Real-Time Temperature Estimation of Three-Core Medium-Voltage Cable Joint Based on Support Vector Regression

The joint is the weakest link in three-core medium-voltage power cable systems and the temperature is an essential indicator to its insulation condition. Therefore, a model to estimate the temperature inside the three-core cable joint was built based on support vector regression (SVR) with two fixed cable surface temperatures as inputs. The samples for model training were obtained from 3-D transient thermal analyses through finite element method (FEM) under different single-step currents. A temperature-rise test of 15 kV three-core cable joint was carried out and the estimated temperature based on SVR agrees well with the measured result with a maximum error of about 4 °C. Besides, the proposed model could accurately estimate the joint temperature even though the thermal conductivity of armor wrap used in thermal analysis for model training differs from its real value. The accuracies and calculation speed of the proposed model were compared with those of FEM, showing a better generality of our model. A temperature-rise test under unbalanced three-phase currents was performed and the temperature estimation errors are within 6 °C, indicating the applicability of the method. The effect of contact resistance was briefly discussed in the end. This approach helps improve cable operation and maintenance.