Magnetic-Thermal Coupling Analysis of Saturable Reactor

As the vital equipment of ultra-high voltage direct current (UHVDC) transmission, the anodic saturable reactor is crucial to the safe operation of converter valve. Based on dynamic core loss model, the eddy current analysis and core loss calculation on saturable reactor are carried out by finite-element method (FEM) simulation software Maxwell. Through the fast-mapping interpolation method between heterogeneous meshes, the core loss is mapped from electromagnetic field to the fluid field by Fluent user-defined functions (UDFs), which makes the distribution of heat source more realistic. The distributions of temperature and velocity of the anodic saturable reactor are obtained by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation software Fluent. The temperature simulation results show that the hottest spots inside the core and on the reactor inner toroidal surface are 117.4 °C and 80.5 °C, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate the validity of the calculation methods of core loss and temperature distribution.