Determination of Overhead Power Line Cables Configuration by FEM and Meshless FDM

The paper addresses numerical modeling of overhead power line cables subjected to static loads. Cable extensibility, their large 3D displacements as well as an interaction with strings of insulators and elastic towers are considered. A 2D exact closed solution available for certain type of loading was generalized by us to a 3D displacement case and applied as one of the benchmarks, that were used in convergence, efficiency and accuracy studies of numerical methods to select the most reliable one. Various formulations of the problem (strong and weak in both the Bubnov and local Petrov–Galerkin MLPG-5 versions) as well as various solution approximation approaches were examined, namely the finite element method (FEM) with the higher order shape functions as well as for the first time the meshless finite difference method (MFDM). Validation done by comparison of the numerical results with in situ measurements confirmed that the assumed models are reliable.