Title: Solving overhead transmission line engineering problems with elastic catenary equations

Authors: Hervé Ducloux

Addresses: Réseau de Transport d'Electricité, La Défense, France

Abstract: Most methods used to solve overhead line sag-tension problems assume that the conductor is inextensible. This assumption leads to the classical catenary curve. In this article, the conductor is assumed to be extensible, which leads to the more accurate elastic catenary curve. First, an original mathematical approach of establishing the equations of this curve is proposed: it uses the slope to connect the abscissa and the ordinate of each point on the curve. Then, it is used to solve sag-tension problems for perfectly linear elastic conductor or composite conductor with nonlinear inelastic behaviour. In each case, all steps of the algorithms proposed are explained. The numerical examples included in this paper show that the number of iterations needed to solve a sag-tension problem is quite small. Comparisons with previous studies are also made to assess the accuracy of the proposed method.

Keywords: equations of elastic catenary curves; overhead transmission lines; sag-tension problems.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2025.146074

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2025 Vol.28 No.3, pp.267 - 277

Received: 11 Oct 2023
Accepted: 23 May 2024
Published online: 06 May 2025 *

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