Evaluation of the Proximity Effect upon the Impedance Characteristics of Subsea Power Transmission Cables

Abstract: This paper presents an evaluation of the proximity effect upon the impedance characteristics of single-core and three-core subsea cables. The proximity effect is often ignored in subsea cable models as used by the computer based simulation packages that are widely used for establishing the performance of offshore electrical power systems. Two common types of subsea cables have been investigated in this paper; single-core and three-core cables. Models have been developed and results presented which clearly show that the proximity effect has almost no effect on single-core cables but has a significant effect upon three-core cables. The paper concludes that when calculating the harmonic impedance of single-core subsea cables then only skin effect needs to be accounted for but for three-core cables then both skin effect and proximity effects must be considered