Electric Power Systems Research 97 (2013) 76–83

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Electric Power Systems Research

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/epsr

Modeling the impact of electric vehicle charging on heat transfer around

underground cables
Jeffrey S. Marshall ∗ , Paul D. Hines, Jiarui D. Zhang, Francesca Minervini, Simtha Rinjitham
School of Engineering, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT 05450, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: While increased use of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) has environmental and economic benefits, the
Received 18 September 2012 increased load is expected to strain components of the power delivery infrastructure. Within electric
Received in revised form 7 December 2012 distribution systems, overloading of transformers and underground cables and associated thermal degra-
Accepted 10 December 2012
dation is of particular concern. The current paper estimates the effect of different levels and types of PEV
Available online 16 January 2013
charging on transient heating of underground cables. Transportation survey data is used to estimate travel
miles and arrival/departure times for a typical residential neighborhood, which is subsequently used to
Keywords:
estimate the electric load curve with different levels of PEV penetration. The estimated load curves are
Underground cables
Cable heat transfer
used to perform transient heat transfer computations for a system of three buried cables using an overset
Plug-in electric vehicles grid finite-difference approach, the results of which are used to estimate acceleration of cable thermal
Thermal engineering degradation. Vehicle charging, even for a modest 30% PEV penetration, is found to nearly double peak
Overset grid method temperature rise above ambient at the cable surface, increase the daily variance in cable temperatures,
Cable life span and significantly decrease the estimated time to failure for cables with thermally sensitive insulation.
© 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction transient calculations, that the heat source changes as a series

The expected increase in market penetration of plug-in elec-
tric vehicles (PEVs) will introduce substantially higher electric
loads, placing strains on the entire electricity supply system [1].
Clustering of PEV owners within certain neighborhoods, result-
ing from factors such as availability of charging infrastructure,
advertising and social influence [2], will result in local PEV adop-
tion rates that are substantially higher than national averages.
Since most PEV charging in the near term will be done at resi-
dences and will be highly non-uniform in time, thermally sensitive
parts of the residential distribution system (e.g., transformers
and underground cables) are particularly prone to failure [3].
Several studies have examined the thermal effects of PEV charg-
ing on distribution transformers [4–7]; however, the impact of
PEV charging on distribution cables has not been previously
examined.
A variety of different analytical and computational models have
been used to solve for underground cable temperature fields.
A survey of steady-state analytical methods is given by Neher
and McGrath [8], which has been extended to transient prob-
lems in [9–13]. These analytical models are subject to a number
of simplifications, including the assumption that the ground sur-
face is an isotherm, that cables are a line source of heat, and for
∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 802 656 3826.
E-mail address: jmarsha1@uvm.edu (J.S. Marshall).
of discrete step functions. Analytical models have been shown to
provide reasonable solutions provided that the cables are buried
sufficiently deeply, that cables in a multi-cable system are sep-
arated sufficiently far from one another, that the soil properties
are homogeneous throughout the computational domain, and that
a sufficient number of step changes in heat source are used to
resolve the load curve with reasonable accuracy [13,14]. A vari-
ety of numerical methods have been proposed in order to consider
more general underground cable heat transfer problems, includ-
ing finite-element [15–17] and finite-volume [18] methods. Several
studies examine the effects of moisture variation in a transient
thermal model [18–20] and the problem of heterogeneous soil
conductivity [21]. A boundary-element method for the cable tem-
perature field [22] has been shown to offer high efficiency in
a semi-infinite domain. Nonlinear effects due to temperature-
dependent insulation electrical resistance have also been examined
[23].
Since the near-cable temperature field is best described in
a polar coordinate system and the far-field temperature is best
described in a Cartesian coordinate system, it is natural to consider
use of an overset grid approach for cable heat transfer problems.
A type of overset grid method is proposed in [24], but instead of
interpolating between the fringe points of the overlapping grids,
they redistributed the heat transfer from each cable onto a set
of four Cartesian grid cells of the outer grid. A full overset grid
approach for underground cable heat transfer was introduced in
[25] for non-homogeneous soils.

0378-7796/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.epsr.2012.12.006
 J.S. Marshall et al. / Electric Power Systems Research 97 (2013) 76–83
Fig. 1. Illustration of the method used to simulate charging load patterns from survey data.
The current study examines transient heat transfer about a set of
three underground cables with different PEV penetrations and dif-
ferent charging rates. The cables simulated represent a fully loaded
feeder serving a residential neighborhood with 1000 homes in the
United States. Transportation survey data are used to develop pre-
dictions for impact of PEV charging on the load curve. Transient
numerical solutions for cable temperature field are generated for
each scenario using an overset grid approach based on a finite-
difference discretization. The significance of transient temperature
calculation with oscillating cable heat flux is examined in compari-
son to steady-state computations. The transient thermal results are
used to estimate influence of different levels of PEV penetration on
cable thermal degradation as a function of thermal sensitivity of the
insulation materials. The results indicate that PEV charging has a
highly nonlinear impact on degradation of materials with high ther-
mal sensitivity, but fairly linear insulation degradation response for
materials with low thermal sensitivity.
Section 2 discusses generation of the load curve scenarios
for different PEV penetration levels and different charging rates.
The numerical model used for transient thermal calculations is
described in Section 3, followed in Section 4 by a discussion of the
transient heat transfer results. An estimate of the enhanced cable
thermal degradation due to PEV charging is given in Section 5 as
a function of material thermal sensitivity, and Section 6 presents
conclusions.
2. Effect of PEV charging on load curves
The first step in understanding the impact of PEV charging on
underground cables is to accurately model the variable electric
loads that result from residential PEV charging. Previous stud-
ies of the effect of PEV charging on electric load have focused
on the magnitude of the load increase [3,26,27], and have often
added the PEV charging load as a step increase from the baseline
load. A few recent studies have considered more detailed tempo-
ral vehicle travel data [6,7]. Several charge management schemes
have been proposed that would modify the load curve to miti-
gate effects of PEV charging without changing the daily average
load [5,6,28].
The cable load model used in this paper combines PEV charg-
ing load based on travel survey data with a standard residential
power demand profile, using the method reported in [7] and illus-
trated schematically in Fig. 1. The baseline load is scaled from the
data in [29] to represent 1000 single-family homes with 1 kW per
home average load. The model simulates PEV charging demand for
each vehicle by randomly sampling one-day vehicle tours from the
New England subset of the 2009 National Household Travel Survey.
The data for each randomly selected vehicle day includes vehicle
departure and arrival times, as well as the number of miles traveled
77
during each home-to-home tour. The travel times and distances are
converted into charging load for each vehicle i and for each 15-min
time interval in the day, Li (t), by assuming that charging begins
immediately upon arrival at home at either AC Level 1 (1.65 kW) or
AC Level 2 (6.6 kW). The charging continues, increasing the battery’s
state of charge (SOC) at the specified rate, until SOC reaches 100%
or until the vehicle leaves home. Each vehicle’s initial (midnight)
SOC is determined by running the model for several days with the
same charging pattern until the midnight SOC is unchanged. The
model assumes an electric drive efficiency of 0.256 kWh per mile,
a charging efficiency of 87% and a 10.4 kWh battery capacity (rep-
resenting reported values for the Chevy Volt). This study examines
PEV penetration levels of 5%, 15% and 30%, with the assumption of
two vehicles per home. The total simulated load on the feeder, P(t),
is the sum of the baseline residential load and the vehicle loads, or

n
P(t) = Lr (t) + Li (t). (1)
i=1
The results in this paper include cases with 0%, 50% and 100% of
vehicles charging at Level 2 (6.6 kW) rates, with the remaining
vehicles using Level 1 charging.
Fig. 2 shows the three-phase cable load for the baseline case and
for three levels of PEV penetration, all with Level 1 charging. PEV
charging is observed to have no effect on the morning load peak,
but to significantly increase electricity usage in the afternoon and
evening hours. Fig. 2b shows the impact of Level 2 charging, which
significantly increases the magnitude of the peak load, but slightly
decreases the load during the time interval after the peak. In order
to ensure that the data for the randomly selected households can
be regarded as typical, the load computations are repeated for 25
different random selections for a case with 25% PEV penetration and
50% Level 2 charging. Both the average and the standard deviation
of the load computed from these 25 sample sets differ from each
other by less than 3%.
The total power P(t) is used to solve for the cable current I(t)
assuming balanced loads in each of the three-phase cables, with
a power factor of 0.95. In order to simulate older medium volt-
age installations, we used a 4.16 kV nominal line voltage. The
modeled cable is tape-shielded 5 kV 4/0 AWG aluminum conductor,
with rated current of 225 A, conductor radius r2 = 5.85 mm, insu-
lation outer radius r1 = 8.14 mm (such that insulation thickness is
2.29 mm), and overall cable radius a = 12.45 mm. These parame-
ters are typical of many buried medium voltage cables, particularly
for older installations where lower voltages are used and insulator
degradation is of particular concern. For the baseline residential
load the average current is 146 A and the peak baseline current is
207 A.
78 J.S. Marshall et al. / Electric Power Systems Research 97 (2013) 76–83

Fig. 2. Load power (above) and heat flux (below) for baseline load (dashed line), with (panels a and c) three different levels of PEV penetration – 5% (blue), 15% (red) and 30%
(green) – and (panels b and d) three different amounts of fast charging for 30% PEV penetration – 0% (blue), 50% (red) and 100% (green). (For interpretation of the references
to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

The power dissipated within each cable per unit length, Ploss (t), layer, the conductor shield and the insulation screen are negligi-
is computed from the square of the current, using an ac resistance bly small. We also neglect dielectric losses within the insulation,
of 4.1 × 10−4 /m (computed using the method described in IEC as is common for medium voltage cables [13]. The maximum tem-
Standard 60287-1-1). While the cable ac resistance is somewhat perature of the insulation, TI , can then be related to the cable outer
temperature-dependent, standard estimates indicate a difference surface temperature Tsurf by
of only about 10% for the range of temperature variation observed in  
the current problem. The heat flux q0 (t) on the cable outer surface ln(r2 /r1 ) ln(a/r2 )
TI = Tsurf + aq0 + . (2)
r = a is given by q0 (t) = Ploss (t)/2a. Fig. 2c and d show the corre- kins kj
sponding heat flux values (in W/m2 ) for the different loading cases,
Values for the model parameters, such as the thermal conductivi-
with and without Level 2 charging. Because heat flux depends on
ties of the insulation and jacket materials, kins and kj , are given in
the square of the current, the load peaks caused by PEV charging
Table 1.
are accentuated, resulting in substantially larger variations in cable
Transient heat transfer in the soil surrounding the cables is gov-
heat flux.
erned by the two-dimensional heat equation
∂T
3. Computational method for thermal modeling = ˛∇ 2 T, (3)
∂t

The temperature field simulations consist of two coupled parts.
The outer problem consists of solution for temperature distribution
within the soil using the prescribed heat flux on the cable outer sur-
face, which is performed numerically. The inner problem consists
of solution for the temperature profile within the cable insulation
based on the average temperature on the cable outer surface. This
inner problem is solved analytically using the assumption that the
heat transfer within the cable occurs much more rapidly than that
within the soil, and hence the temperature profile within the cable
is approximately at steady state.
The inner cable solution employs an axisymmetric cable model
consisting of six different layers – conductor, conductor shield,
insulation, insulation screen, sheath, and jacket. We simplify the
problem by assuming that the thermal resistance of the sheath
where T is temperature, ˛ = k/c is the soil thermal diffusivity, and
∇ 2 is the Laplace operator. Typical properties for soil are obtained
from [31] for medium grade sand, which agree with the recom-
mended values for cable thermal analysis by Anders [13]. Eq. (3) is
solved on the domain shown in Fig. 3a, consisting of a rectangular
domain with uniform soil properties containing three single-core
cables spaced at a depth D and positioned horizontally a distance H
apart, each with equal surface heat flux q0 (t). An isothermal bound-
ary condition T = T0 is prescribed on the lower and the two side
boundaries of the computational domain. A convective boundary
condition is applied at the top surface of the form

∂T 
−k = h (T − Ta ) , (4)
∂y 
y=0
 J.S. Marshall et al. / Electric Power Systems Research 97 (2013) 76–83 79

Fig. 3. Schematic diagrams showing (a) the computational domain and (b) fringe points of the outer grid (open circles) and inner grid (filled circles). In (b), outer grid cells
that overlap the outer boundary of the inner grid are shaded in gray.

where k is the thermal conductivity of soil, h is the heat transfer ambient air, and L is a characteristic length scale, which drops out
coefficient at the top surface, and Ta is the atmospheric temper- of (5). Assuming a nominal 10 ◦ C temperature difference between
ature. The soil and air are assumed to have the same ambient the air and the ground gives the Grashof number as Gr = 3.6 × 109 ,
temperatures, so that a steady-state solution will exist that is inde- which for a typical value Pr = 0.7 yields Nu = 163.3 and a corre-
pendent of computational domain size. The heat transfer coefficient sponding heat transfer coefficient for atmospheric convection as
h is estimated for natural convection over a flat surface as in [32] h = 4.4 W/(m2 K)
To reduce the number of parameters, the problem is non-
hL
Nu ≡ = 0.12(Gr Pr)1/3 , (5) dimensionalized using the cable diameter d = 2a as a length scale,
kA
a characteristic load variation time scale (one day), and a charac-
where Nu is the Nusselt number, Gr = (/)gL3 /A2 is the Grashof teristic cable surface heat flux q̄, where the latter is determined by
number and Pr = A /˛A is the Prandtl number of the air flow. Here, computing the average value of heat flux in the baseline load over
kA , A and ˛A are the thermal conductivity, kinematic viscosity and one day. Dimensionless temperature
(x , y , t  ), positions (x , y ),
thermal diffusivity of air, respectively, / is the characteristic and time t  are defined by
relative density change between air near the heated surface and
k x y t

= (T − T0 ) , x = , y = , t = . (6)
q̄d d d 
Table 1
Parameters used in numerical computations. The temperatures can be converted into dimensional units, for the
q̄ value and cable size listed in Table 1, by multiplying
by approx-
Quantity Source Symbol Value
imately 2.9 ◦ C.
Soil thermal conductivity 1 k 1.0 W/(m K) An overset grid approach is used in order to transfer heat gener-
Soil density 1  1700 kg/m3
ated by the cables onto the Cartesian grid. Each cable is surrounded
Soil specific heat 1 c 1000 J/(kg K)
Soil thermal diffusivity 1 ˛ = k/c 5.9 × 10−7 m2 /s by a polar “inner grid” which extends out a distance ı from the cable
Air Prandtl number 2 Pr 0.70 outer surface. The outer points of the polar grid are called the fringe
Air Grashof number 2 Gr 3.6 × 109 points of the inner grid, indicated by filled circles in Fig. 3b. Outer
Air thermal conductivity 2 kA 0.027 W/(m K) grid cells that contain part of the outer surface of the inner grid
Heat transfer coefficient to 2 h 4.4 W/(m2 K)
are called overhanging cells, indicated by shading in Fig. 3b. Nodes
atmosphere
Cable outer radius 3 a 12.45 mm of these overhanging cells that are contained within the inner grid
Cable conductor radius 3 r1 5.85 mm are the fringe points of the outer grid, indicated by the open circles
Cable insulation outer 3 r2 8.14 mm in Fig. 3b. The temperature on each set of fringe points is deter-
radius
mined at each time step by bilinear interpolation from the grid
Cable AC resistance per 4 RAC 4.1 × 10−4 /m
unit length
cells of the other overlapping grid. The temperature solution in the
Cable burial depth 3 D 1.0 m outer grid is obtained using the Alternating-Direction Implicit (ADI)
Cable spacing distance 3 H 10 cm method [33]. Within the inner grid, the heat equation is solved in
Cable voltage V 4.167 kV polar coordinates (r  , ϕ) using the Crank–Nicolson method. Both the
Ambient soil temperature T0 30 ◦ C
ADI and Crank–Nicolson methods are second-order accurate and
Atmospheric temperature Ta 30 ◦ C
Baseline average heat flux q̄ 116.1 W/m2 unconditionally stable. A series of computations were performed
Insulation thermal 5 kins 0.286 W/(m K) which showed that the solutions are not sensitive to choice of spa-
conductivity tial or temporal step sizes or to the overall size of the computational
Jacket thermal conductivity 5 kj 0.20 W/(m K) domain.
Length scale (cable d 24.9 mm
diameter)
Time scale ␶ 1 day 4. Heat transfer results
Domain depth and Lx , Ly 200, 140
half-width Transient heat transfer results are obtained over a 20-day period
Outer grid step size x = y 0.13
for the baseline load using the steady state solution as an initial
Inner grid radial step size r  0.033
Inner grid azimuthal step  0.33 rad condition. Results for the time variation of the circumferentially
size averaged temperature
ave (t) for the middle cable are plotted in
Time step t  0.00005 Fig. 4 as a function of the time for each PEV penetration level. The
1, [29,13]; 2, [30] with natural convection and T ∼
= 10 ◦ C; 3, IEC 60287-3-1; 4, IEC maximum value of
ave (t) increases from 2.8 in the baseline load
60287-1-1; 5, IES Standard 60287-2-1. case to 4.8 for the 30% PEV penetration case, which is a 71% increase.
80 J.S. Marshall et al. / Electric Power Systems Research 97 (2013) 76–83
Fig. 4. Transient computational results for time variation of average surface temperature on center cable over a period of 20 days with (a) baseline load, (b) 5% PEV penetration,
(c) 15% PEV penetration, and (d) 30% PEV penetration, where all cases are for Level 1 charging only.
This temperature increase is comparable to the approximately 64%
increase in peak heat flux value between these cases (Fig. 2c). Cases
with high PEV penetration exhibit much more pronounced temper-
ature variability during each load cycle compared to the baseline
case. The maximum temperature difference during the daily load
cycle nearly doubles from its value of approximately 1.0 in the
baseline case to about 2.0 for the 30% penetration case. This variabil-
ity could have an impact on cable life, as the conductor expands and
contracts more during each daily cycle. The baseline case exhibits
two temperature peaks, with one peak in the morning and a larger
ave (t), such that the
peak in the late afternoon and early evening. The results in Fig. 4
I,max (t) at the boundary of
with high PEV penetration, by contrast, exhibit a single large peak
in the late afternoon and early evening due to the disproportion-
ately heavy electricity usage for vehicle charging during this time
I,max (t) =
ave (t) + ln(r2 /r1 ) + ln(a/r2 ) . (7)
period.
The computational solutions can also be used to compare
results of transient heat transfer simulations to those that would
ave (t) and
I,max (t) is
be obtained from a quasi-steady-state simulation, which are
commonly used in cable thermal analysis. Examination of the fluc-
tuating temperature field indicates that a region extending a length
of about five cable diameters away from the cables exhibits signif-
icant temperature fluctuations, and that outside of this region the
temperature field is nearly constant. This behavior is a consequence
of the fact that the time scale for heat conduction within the soil
(D2 /˛) is significantly longer than the load cycle. In Fig. 5 is plotted
the time variation of the dimensionless heat flux q and of the ratio
ave (t)/q over a daily load cycle. In a quasi-steady-state analysis,
the ratio
ave (t)/q will be constant in time. By contrast, in Fig. 5a
for the baseline case this ratio varies significantly. The variation of
this ratio in the 30% PEV penetration case (Fig. 5b) is even greater,
ranging from a minimum of about 1.4 to a maximum of about 5.0.
The minimum values of the
ave (t)/q curve in Fig. 5 correspond electric cables depends on exposure to mechanical forces, mois-
to the maximum values of the heat flux q , and vice versa. This
phenomenon occurs because at a heat flux minimum, the soil region
surrounding the cables is warmer than it would be at steady state
for the given heat flux value due to the thermal mass of the sur-
rounding soil. The opposite happens at a heat flux maximum. The
transient analysis thus yields lower values of cable surface tem-
perature at the peak heat flux values (and higher temperatures
at the minimum heat flux values) than would be predicted by a
quasi-steady analysis.
The temperature internal to the cable insulation can be obtained
using (2) from the cable surface temperature
maximum dimensionless temperature
the insulation and the conductor is
 
q0 (t) k k
2q̄ kins kj
A plot comparing the time variation of
given in Fig. 6 for the baseline and the 30% PEV penetration cases. In
both instances, the maximum internal temperature is substantially
larger than the surface temperature and exhibits a more irregular
appearance than the surface temperature plot. Rather gradual vari-
ation in cable surface temperature results in pronounced peaks and
valleys in the internal temperature. The reason for these differences
is that while the time variation of the cable surface temperature is
moderated by the thermal mass of the surrounding soil, the differ-
ence between cable surface and internal temperatures is directly
proportional to the heat flux with no thermal mass modification.
5. Implications for cable thermal decay
Degradation of the insulation materials used for underground
ture, high temperatures, and high electric loads [34]. The primary
 J.S. Marshall et al. / Electric Power Systems Research 97 (2013) 76–83 81

Fig. 5. Plots showing time variation over one day of the dimensionless heat flux (dashed line) and ratio of average dimensionless surface temperature of the middle cable to
the heat flux (solid line) for (a) baseline case and (b) 30% PEV penetration with Level 1 charging.

insulation materials of concern in distribution cables typically where C̄1 ≡ C1 exp(C2 /T0 ) and C̄2 ≡ C2 q̄d/kT02 .
include oil-paper and XPLE insulation. Since new construction will Both the cable voltage and the electric field E in (8) are approx-
likely be designed to accommodate higher loads that account for imately constant, and the only time-dependent variable is the
PEV charging, the current study is particularly interested in insu- temperature TI (t). Following Mazzanti [38], the loss fraction F(t)
lation materials used in existing underground cable installations. is defined as
While there is a great deal of variability, most materials exhibit  t
some degree of enhanced decay rate at high temperatures [35]. d
F(t) = , (10)
The effect of temperature on material degradation is often modeled 0
L[TI ()]
using an Arrhenius expression [36], in which the estimated “time-
where  is a dummy variable of integration. Cable failure is consid-
to-fracture” LC under constant temperature and electric fields is
ered to occur at time tF for which F(tF ) = 1. Assuming that the failure
given by
time will be much longer than one day, the number of cycles (days)
 w − E  C  to failure, NF , is obtained from (10) in terms of an integral over a
2
LC = C1 exp = C1 exp , (8) single cycle as
RTI TI
 1 −1
where w is the activation energy for structural failure, R is the dt 
universal gas constant, is a structure parameter, TI is the abso- NF = . (11)
0
L[
I (t  )]
lute temperature at the cable-insulation interface, and C1 and C2
are constants such that C2 ≡ (w − E)/R. The product E is gen- Substituting (9) into (11), the ratio of number of cycles (days) to
erally substantially smaller than w, such that C2 > 0. Together, the failure for a case with PEV penetration to that for the base load is
values of the coefficients C1 and C2 determine the material sensi- obtained as
tivity to thermal degradation. The expression (8) is also commonly 1
used for scaling of accelerated thermal testing on insulation mate- NF 0
exp[C̄2
I,base (t  )]dt 
rials [34,37]. Using the temperature non-dimensionalization (6) NF,base
= 1 . (12)
0
exp[C̄2
I (t  )]dt 
and assuming that the relative temperature TI −T0 is much smaller
than the ambient absolute temperature T0 , such that TI−1 ∼= T0−1 (1 − A plot of the time variation of the life factor F(t), normalized by
q̄d
I /kT0 ), Eq. (8) is approximately the coefficient C̄1 , is shown in Fig. 7a for the case with 30% PEV
penetration for simulations with both C̄2 = 0.1 and C̄2 = 1. In the
L(t) ∼
= C̄1 exp[−C̄2
I (t  )], (9) case with C̄2 = 0.1, the argument of the exponential term in (9)

Fig. 6. Comparison of the time variation of the average dimensionless surface temperature
ave on the middle cable (solid line) with the maximum internal insulation
temperature at the insulation–conductor boundary
I,max (dashed line) for (a) the baseline case and (b) the case with 30% PEV penetration with Level 1 charging. The
dimensional temperature values (in ◦ C) are also given for the specific parameter values listed in Table 1 on the right-hand axis of the plots.
82 J.S. Marshall et al. / Electric Power Systems Research 97 (2013) 76–83
Fig. 7. Life span plots showing (a) time variation of the life factor F(t) normalized by the coefficient C̄1 for the case with 30% PEV penetration with Level 1 charging with
C̄2 = 0.1 (dashed line, numbers on right) and C̄2 = 1 (solid line, numbers on left). (b) Ratio of the number of cycles to failure with PEV penetration to that for the baseline load
as a function of the coefficient C̄2 , for cases with 5% PEV penetration (upper solid line), 15% PEV penetration (middle solid line), and 30% PEV penetration (lower solid line),
all with Level 1 charging. Also shown in (b) are cases with 30% PEV penetration and 50% Level 2 charging (upper dashed line) and 100% Level 2 charging (lower dashed line).
is relatively small, such that the exponent is close to unity and
F(t) is nearly linear in time. The argument of the exponential term
becomes large near the peak temperature value for the case with
C̄2 = 1, so the corresponding plot for F(t) exhibits a sudden, highly
non-linear jump as the internal cable temperature approaches its
peak value.
The ratio of number of days to failure with PEV penetration
divided by that of the baseline case, given by (11), is plotted in
Fig. 7b for cases with Level 1 charging having 5%, 15% and 30%
PEV penetration and for cases with 50% and 100% Level 2 charg-
ing having 30% PEV penetration, with C̄2 values varying over the
interval (0.1,1). Since there are few studies that determine C2 for
distribution cables, an estimated value is obtained using data for
coefficients for high voltage cable insulation decay from [36], giv-
ing C2 ∼ 4
= 1.7 × 10 K. Using the thermal data listed in Table 1, we
obtain an estimated value C̄2 ∼ = 0.54. Alternatively, the ‘10-degree
rule’ [39] says that the expected time to failure of cable insulation
in the distribution system will reduce by a factor of 2 when the
temperature increases by X ◦ C, where reported values of X range
from 6 to 10. From (9), this rule suggests that C̄2 will be between
0.2 and 0.33.
For C̄2 = 0, the life span is independent of temperature and PEV
penetration has no effect on cable life. As C̄2 increases, the exponen-
tial term in (9) becomes increasingly significant and the predictions
for NF become increasingly sensitive to the temperature variation
associated with PEV charging. The curves for all three PEV pene-
tration levels exhibit a decrease in the estimated number of cycles
to failure relative to the baseline case with an increase in C̄2 . How-
ever, because of the exponential term in (9) this change in estimated
cable lifespan is highly non-linear, particularly for larger values of
C̄2 . For instance, for the case with C̄2 = 1, the estimated number
of cycles to failure for the case with 5% PEV penetration is 57% of
that for the baseline case, whereas the number of cycles to failure
for the 30% penetration case is only 3% of the baseline case. While
we find significant differences in estimated cable life between the
different levels of PEV penetration, a comparison of the life span
predictions for the 30% penetration case with different charging
rates indicates only minor reduction in predicted cable life as the
charging rate is increased for C̄2 < 0.5. This is consistent with the
observation that for small values of C̄2 the life span depends mainly
on the average insulation temperature, whereas for larger values of
C̄2 life span depends primarily on the peak temperature value. The
cases with different levels of Level 2 charging have approximately
the same average temperature for a given PEV penetration value,
but exhibit increased peak temperature value as the percentage of
fast charging is increased.
One of the chief reasons that PEV loads substantially increase
cable aging is that the peak time for PEV charging tends to coincide
with the peak evening residential load. Since cable life span is highly
sensitive to peak temperature, particularly for insulation mate-
rials with higher values of the thermal sensitivity coefficient C̄2 ,
this peak cable loading can control the degradation in cable life
span, even if it lasts for only relatively brief periods. Fortunately,
this problem can be substantially mitigated through incentives and
technology that encourage vehicle charging to occur later in the
evening. However, a note of caution is required with respect to the
design of such “Smart Charging” schemes. Very simple schemes,
such as preventing vehicle charging before a fixed hour (e.g.,
10 pm), could have unexpected negative consequences. For the
case of overhead transformers, prior work [7] showed that simple
peak/off-peak schemes can result in substantial load increases at
the beginning of the off-peak period, which could cause unwanted
thermal impacts on the distribution infrastructure. A better option
is to deploy schemes that spread charging load out more evenly
over a longer period of time (see, e.g., [40]), making use of Smart
Grid technology to keep cable loads below their thermal limits.
6. Conclusions
This paper describes, and provides illustrative results from, a
new method to simulate the time-domain thermal impacts of elec-
tric vehicle charging on direct buried underground distribution
cables. Load curve estimates were obtained with different PEV pen-
etration levels and with different proportions of Level 1 and Level
2 charging based on empirical driver data. Increases in PEV pen-
etration and increases in the level of fast charging enhance the
peak electric load. The paper uses a novel overset grid method,
with a polar grid around each cable embedded in an outer Carte-
sian grid, to compute transient heat transfer around the cables. The
overset grid approach provided rapid computation while main-
taining high accuracy in the region around each cable. Transient
computations indicate that the daily load fluctuations influence the
temperature only within about five cable diameters, and outside
this region the temperature profile is similar to the steady-state
temperature field. The magnitude of the daily thermal oscillation
on the cable surface increases substantially with PEV penetration,
approximately doubling as the PEV penetration is increased from 0
to 30%. The transient temperature peak values were slightly less and
the temperature minimum values were slightly greater than would
be predicted by a steady state computation based on the instanta-
neous heat flux values, due to the effect of the thermal mass in the
transient computations.
 J.S. Marshall et al. / Electric Power Systems Research 97 (2013) 76–83
Estimates of the effect of PEV charging on cable design life where
conducted using the standard Arrhenius expression for impact of
cable temperature on the insulation. The results were found to be
particularly sensitive to a single dimensionless parameter associ-
ated with the insulation activation energy, the cable size and heat
flux, and the soil thermal conductivity. For estimated values of
this parameter, the cable life span was found to be substantially
reduced by even modest levels of PEV penetration. The major fac-
tor responsible for decrease in life span is the fact that the projected
evening PEV charging coincides with the existing peak in the base-
line load curve, thus yielding cable temperature spikes with values
far exceeding that in the baseline case. The nonlinear dependence
of the life span model on the temperature yields high sensitivity
to these temperature spikes. This problem could be mitigated by
time-of-use pricing or Smart Charging schemes intended to spread
PEV charging over non-peak load periods. A modeling tool such as
that proposed here could be useful in planning cable replacement
projects for cables known to be operating near their thermal limits,
as well as for interacting with a Smart Charging allocation system
designed to mitigate cable charge overloads.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Pooya Rezai, Alex Hilshey, Jonathan
Dowds, and Justine Sears for assistance with the NHTS-based travel
model. We particularly appreciate the hospitality shown by San-
dia National Laboratories for hosting two students and two faculty
members working on this project during Summer 2011. Special
thanks to Sandia staff members Juan Torres, Jason Stamp, Abbas
Akhil, and Mike Hightower for their insights on electric power
systems. This work was supported in part by a workforce develop-
ment sub-award from Sandia National Laboratories, supported by
the U.S. Department of Energy through Inter-Entity Work Order #
M610000767, in part by the U.S. Army Research Office under grant
number W911NF-07-1-0483, and in part by the U.S. Department of
Transportation through the University of Vermont Transportation
Research Center grant #TRC039.
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