Electrical-thermal Interaction Study of Electrical Busway using Finite Element Analysis.

This paper presents an approach for determining temperature distribution on a 2200A busway model. Solidwork software was used in order to create 3D modeling of busway model. This paper proposes a simulation model developed by coupling the multiphysics between electrical analysis and thermal analysis. The coupling was done by using ANSYS Workbench and ANSYS Maxwell. Basically, the electrical analysis is performed onwards busway model in order to get the value of ohmic loss which is heat loss from the conductors in the busway. The ohmic loss results will be imported to thermal analysis in order to get the temperature result as well as temperature distribution. First, the direct current loading of the busbar, which neglect the alternating current effects, was considered. Second, the alternating current loading of busbar was used instead of direct current loading. The model of the second approach gives much more accurate result in term of temperature difference. The presented model was validated against temperature measurement on real size busway under electrical loading. The obtained results show that a very good agreement between computed and experimental data. Once the verification of the model is done, the busway configurations setup behavior is studied. Increasing number of feeder affects thermal stress concentration on busway joint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]