Back at the end of June, PhD student Tim Hughes attended the Jicable’15 conference, held in Versailles, France with a number of colleagues from the Tony Davies High Voltage Laboratory, situated on the Highfield campus of the University. The quandrennial Jicable meetings provide an international forum for discussion of research regarding insulated power cables. The meeting was held between 21st and 25th June 2015 at the Palais des Congrès de Versailles, a proverbial stone’s throw from the famous Palace.

During the conference, there were a number of talks that highlighted the challenges associated with installing high voltage (HV) cables into the seabed; may of these difficulties are unique to cables buried in a marine environment.

Tim Hughes presented a talk showcasing some of his PhD work, which focuses on modelling how heat generated in submarine HV power cables during the transmission of power is dissipated into the surrounding seabed environment. He talked at length about the influence that the environmental parameters can have on the nature of the heat dissipation from the cable, and how this might differ from the much more familiar and widely studied (from an engineering perspective) scenario of a cable buried on land.

The trip was a valuable opportunity to explore the context of Tim’s work within the wider electrical engineering community