We present an efficient numerical technique for calculating the series impedance matrix of systems with round conductors. The method is based on a surface admittance operator in combination with the method of moments and it accurately predicts both skin and proximity effects. Application to a three-phase armored cable with wire screens demonstrates a speed-up by a factor of about 100 compared to a finite elements computation. The inclusion of proximity effect in combination with the high efficiency makes the new method very attractive for cable modeling within EMTP-type simulation tools. Currently, these tools can only take skin effect into account.

An accurate modeling of skin effect inside conductors is of capital importance to solve transmission line and scattering problems. This paper presents a surface-based formulation to model skin effect in conductors of arbitrary cross section, and compute the per-unit-length impedance of a multiconductor transmission line. The proposed formulation is based on the Dirichlet-Neumann operator that relates the longitudinal electric field to the tangential magnetic field on the boundary of a conductor. We demonstrate how the surface operator can be obtained through the contour integral method for conductors of arbitrary shape. The proposed algorithm is simple to implement, efficient, and can handle arbitrary cross-sections, which is a main advantage over the existing approach based on eigenfunctions, which is available only for canonical conductor's shapes. The versatility of the method is illustrated through a diverse set of examples, which includes transmission lines with trapezoidal, curved, and V-shaped conductors. Numerical results demonstrate the accuracy, versatility, and efficiency of the proposed technique.

Using the traditional surface integral methods, the computation of scattering from a dielectric object requires two equivalent current densities on the boundary of the dielectric. In this paper, we present an approach that requires only a single current density. Our method is based on a surface admittance operator and is applicable to dielectric bodies of arbitrary shape. The formulation results in four times lower memory consumption and up to eight times lower time to solve the linear system than the traditional PMCHWT formulation. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed technique is as accurate as the PMCHWT formulation.

The availability of accurate and broadband models for underground and submarine cable systems is of paramount importance for the correct prediction of electromagnetic transients in power grids. Recently, we proposed the MoM-SO method for extracting the series impedance of power cables while accounting for skin and proximity effect in the conductors. In this paper, we extend the method to include ground return effects and to handle cables placed inside a tunnel. Numerical tests show that the proposed method is more accurate than widely-used analytic formulas, and is much faster than existing proximity-aware approaches like finite elements. For a three-phase cable system in a tunnel, the proposed method requires only 0.3 seconds of CPU time per frequency point, against the 8.3 minutes taken by finite elements, for a speed up beyond 1000 X.

An accurate knowledge of the per-unit length impedance of power cables is necessary to correctly predict electromagnetic transients in power systems. In particular, skin, proximity, and ground return effects must be properly estimated. In many applications, the medium that surrounds the cable is not uniform and can consist of multiple layers of different conductivity, such as dry and wet soil, water, or air. We introduce a multilayer ground model for the recently-proposed MoM-SO method, suitable to accurately predict ground return effects in such scenarios. The proposed technique precisely accounts for skin, proximity, ground and tunnel effects, and is applicable to a variety of cable configurations, including underground and submarine cables. Numerical results show that the proposed method is more accurate than analytic formulas typically employed for transient analyses, and delivers an accuracy comparable to the finite element method (FEM). With respect to FEM, however, MoM-SO is over 1000 times faster, and can calculate the impedance of a submarine cable inside a three-layer medium in 0.10 s per frequency point.