Mathematical modeling of the icing process of a power line insulator

Mathematical modeling of the icing process of a power line insulator

Strijhak S.V. (ISP RAS, Moscow, Russia)
Koshelev K.B. (ISP RAS, Moscow, Russia)
Osipov A.V. (ISP RAS, Moscow, Russia)

Abstract

The article discusses the possibility of the iceFoam solver, developed at the ISP RAS on the basis of the OpenFOAM library, for modeling the icing process of various bodies. The possibilities of using OpenFOAM and Paraview open software systems for modeling the icing processes of an insulator of a power transmission line (power line) using the solution of a system of Navier-Stokes equations for a multiphase medium on a dynamic moving grid are being investigated. The simulation was carried out for the case of a flow around a model of a power line insulator located in the computational domain, with a given distribution of initial physical parameters for velocity, temperature, water content, and droplet size. As a result of the calculation, the fields of velocity, pressure, temperature, and mass of ice are obtained. The calculated area was a cube with a side dimension of 5.6 meters. The calculated unstructured grid included 1.5 million calculated cells. The calculations were performed for the case of flow and icing of an insulator with a voltage of 110 kV for 200 seconds. One typical calculation was run on 96 computer’s cores and took about 4 days to complete. Visualization of the calculation results is performed in the Paraview package using filter technology and software scripts. It is shown that the ice pattern on the inner fragments of the insulator was significantly different from the pattern on the edge parts. Significant amounts of turbulent viscosity were observed in the leeward region of the insulator. The calculations were performed on the high-performance cluster UniHUB of the ISP RAS.

Keywords

mountainous region; snow; precipitation; power line; insulator, modeling; area; grid; drops; velocity; pressure; temperature; film; ice; calculation; high performance cluster; visualization.

Edition

Proceedings of the Institute for System Programming, vol. 38, issue 3, part 1, 2026, pp. 257-268

ISSN 2220-6426 (Online), ISSN 2079-8156 (Print).

DOI: 10.15514/ISPRAS-2026-38(3)-16

For citation

Strijhak S.V., Koshelev K.B., Osipov A.V. Mathematical modeling of the icing process of a power line insulator. Proceedings of the Institute for System Programming, vol. 38, issue 3, part 1, 2026, pp. 257-268 DOI: 10.15514/ISPRAS-2026-38(3)-16.

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