Numerical simulation of heat dissipation processes in underground power cable system situated in thermal backfill and buried in a multilayered soil

•A practical thermal analysis of underground power cable system.•The geological measurements were performed for cable line placement location.•Dry zone formation effect included in soil and FTB thermal conductivity formula.•A simplified FEM model of underground power cable system.•The computational numerical code validation with ANSYS. This paper presents the thermal analysis of the underground transmission line, planned to be installed in one of the Polish power plants. The computations are performed by using the Finite Element Method (FEM) code, developed by the authors. The paper considers a system of three power cables arranged in flat (in-line) formation. The cable line is buried in the multilayered soil. The soil layers characteristic and thermal properties are determined from geological measurements. Different conditions of cable bedding are analyzed including power cables placement in the FTB or direct burial in a mother ground. The cable line burial depth, measured from the ground level, varies from 1m to 2.5m. Additionally, to include the effect of dry zones formation on the temperature distribution in cable line and surroundings, soil and FTB thermal conductivities are considered as a temperature-dependent. The proposed approach for determining the temperature-dependent thermal conductivity of soil layers is discussed in detail. The FEM simulation results are also compared with the results of the simulation that consider soil layers as homogeneous materials. Therefore, thermal conductivity is assumed to be constant for each layer. The results obtained by using the FEM code, developed by the authors, are compared with the results of ANSYS simulations, and a good agreement was found.