Technical Papers and Presentations

Power transmission through power cables installed in ventilated tunnels has been increasingly used worldwide and offers a complex thermal environment. These cables are placed on supports or fixed close to the tunnel walls. Established correlations currently in use have been deduced from a non-fully developed turbulent flow and the effect of the proximity to a tunnel wall is not accounted for precisely. This paper details the experimental and numerical investigations of the heat transfer from a single cable in a fully developed turbulent air flow, with emphasis on the effect of the cable spacing from the tunnel wall. Nusselt numbers have been compared for different spacing and velocities thanks to a coupled model between COMSOL Multiphysics® software and MATLAB® software, where the inverse method is used to identify heat transfer coefficients on the cable surface.