A Practical Approach to Model a Cable with Nonlinear Material Characteristics

Abstract

This paper proposes a practical method to model the Common-Mode (CM) impedance of power cable in Finite Element Analysis (FEA) software. The proposed approach utilizes a reverse-engineering method to estimate the frequency-dependent characteristics of the cable materials. Accordingly, two experimental measurements are proposed to calculate the parameters of the cable assumed from a basic lumped-$\pi$ model. Then the material specifications of the cable PVC are estimated in the FEA software. The results verify that the the proposed model can predict the CM impedance of the cable with a great accuracy in a wide frequency range. This approach is highly practical and convenient, which can be readily extended to different kinds of power cables, ensuring high accuracy at a wide frequency range.