Overhead Electrical Conductors

Stick-slip model (based exclusively on Coulomb’s laws of friction) for conductor bending may be improved by taking into account actual inter-layer contact conditions: elliptical contact areas with tangential elasticity and micro-slip regions. Starting with Papailiou’s model, this has been done by Paradis and Légeron. Work was presented in 2011 at the 9th International Symposium on Cable Dynamics, held in Shanghai (China).  Model has been applied to variable curvature case using FEA (in a Matlab environment). Numerical results are compared with Papailiou’s experimental  results. (pdf copy of paper is attached).