Enhancements to Thermal MALZ:
Conductor Coating and Finite Volumes

The Thermal MALZ prototype for steady-state computations of HVDC electrode heating presented at last year’s UGC has been improved for speed and accuracy, especially for cases in multi-layer soils that include convective effects. Two new features were added: conductor coating and finite volumes of soil in uniform native soils. Validation results are presented for conductor coating against the analytical solution for a torus and for point sources in finite volumes against the analytical solution for a sphere and the two-layer horizontal soil. Practical results are presented for conductors in a backfill represented as a finite volume. However, further work is required to improve computation time and to extend accuracy over more challenging finite-volume cases, especially high-contrast configurations.

Temperature rise (K) of the conductor in a finite volume backfill and
of the reference with no backfill as a function of thermal resistivity.

See the article entitled “Enhancements to Thermal MALZ Conductor Coating and Finite Volumes” in these Proceedings for further details.