Thermal Simulation and Analysis of Dry-Type Air-Core Reactors Based on Multi-Physics Coupling

A reactor is an important piece of equipment used for reactive power compensation in power system and has a significant impact on the safe operation of power system. Thermal behavior is one of the main causes of reactor failures. For an accurate analysis of the thermal behavior of reactors, electromagnetic–thermal–fluid multi-physics coupling modeling is chosen. However, there is a huge difference in size between the overall structure of the reactor and its insulating material, which makes it difficult to perform mesh generation, resulting in dense mesh and significantly increased solution degrees of freedom, thus making the solution of the reactor’s multi-physics field model very time-consuming. To address this, this paper proposes a simplified processing method to accelerate the solution calculation of the reactor’s multi-physics model. This method calculates the equivalent turns of each encapsulate with parallel coils in the reactor, simplifying the encapsulate into a single-layer coil, thereby greatly reducing the division and solution degrees of freedom of the multi-physics model, and thus accelerating the simulation calculation. Taking a BKDCKL-20000/35 dry-type air-core shunt reactor as an example, the outer diameter of the coil is nearly 12,000 times bigger than the coil insulation, which is a huge size difference. Both refined models and simplified models are established. Compared to the simulation results of the detailed model, the simplified model demonstrates good accuracy; the maximum relative error of temperature is just 2.19%. Meanwhile, the computational time of the simplified model is reduced by 35.7%, which shows promising effectiveness and significant potential for applying the optimization design and operation prediction of dry-type air-core shunt reactors for enhanced thermal performance.