FEM Based Modeling And Optimization Of Roebel Cable For SFCL Applications Using PSO

Abstract

 High-temperature superconductors (HTS) are gaining popularity in energy applications especially in the field of fault current limiters (FCL). The Super Conducting Fault Current Limiter (SFCL) has the intrinsic characteristic of changing resistance from zero to nonzero at specific current, which makes it advantageous over traditional circuit breakers. Since the SFCL specifications widely vary depending upon the power system, requirements a flexible design strategy for SFCL design is required. In this paper firstly, the FEM (Finite Element Method) based design and analysis of Roebel cable under self-field performed and after then a PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization), based optimization technique is used to get the design parameters of Robel cable specific to SFCL requirements. The open-source FreeFEM++ tool is used to design, simulate and optimize the FEM model however; MATLAB is used for plotting the data as it provides better plotting abilities. Our main contribution in this work is the integration of the FEM with the PSO algorithm in the FreeFEM++ environment. Since now, there is no any metaheuristic algorithm available for the FreeFEM++ environment. The simulation result shows that the Roebel cable design can be optimized for specific requirements.