Predicting the End-of-Life for OHL Conductors

The electricity generation and demand have increased rapidly in recent years due to the improved quality of life, developed renewable energy strategies (RES), and electrification of traditional heat and transport energy sectors to replace traditional fossil fuels. To accommodate this trend, electric utilities try to avoid the expensive traditional solution of building new overhead lines (OHLs) and reinforce existing networks through re-tensioning old conductors or reconductoring with High-Temperature Low-Sag (HTLS) conductor technologies. The effect of conductor size, structure, and material properties of its individual components (conductive wires and core) on the vibrations’ response have not yet been captured thoroughly in the literature. The main aim of this study is to perform Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to investigate the effectiveness of modelling the real conductor design and studying its vibration fatigue taking into account the inner-interlayer interaction to predict the end-of-life cycles for different types of OHL conductor designs. The FEA showed that homogenizing the conductor geometry would produce underestimated end-of-life predictions, particularly for bi-metallic conductors. This might significantly affect the asset management strategies in the industry and current-uprating methods for OHL designs constrained to conductor vibrations.