As the advancement of Industry 4.0 continues, the power and energy sectors are rapidly undergoing intelligent and digital transformation, leading to the emergence of digital twin technology in the field of electrical equipment. As critical primary equipment, power transformers greatly benefit from the development of digital twin models, which enhance operational reliability, maintenance efficiency, and fault prediction capabilities. However, model-driven digital twin models are often constrained by slow computation speeds. To address this issue, this paper constructs a simplified field-circuit coupled model for oil-immersed power transformers using Modelica, aimed at reducing computational complexity. Additionally, to further enhance computational efficiency, the proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) method is applied to the field computation section for order reduction.
Firstly, we investigate the heat generation, heat dissipation mechanisms, and oil flow circulation of a 35 kV, 800 kV·A scaled-down oil-immersed self-cooled (Oil Natural Air Natural, ONAN) converter transformer prototype. Based on this, a simplified method for coupling thermal and circuit calculations and an equivalent modeling approach for the temperature rise of the converter transformer are proposed. Subsequently, the implementation method and encapsulation form of the thermal circuit coupled model using Modelica are discussed. POD is then employed to reduce the order of the field computation section. Finally, temperature rise experiments on the converter transformer are conducted, and the model's computational data is compared with the experimental results.
The comparison between the model’s computational data and the experimental results reveals significant differences in the range of 0.5 to 2 hours, with the maximum discrepancy reaching 9.8 K at the top sampling point. As the operating time increases, the temperature rise difference gradually diminishes, and the temperatures converge in the steady state. Whether the radiator is considered significantly impacts both the magnitude of the winding temperature rise and the hotspot location. In the steady state, excluding the radiator results in a maximum temperature error of 11.39 K between the model’s calculations and the experimental data, whereas the proposed model's maximum temperature error is 1.37 K, and the full-order model's maximum temperature error is 0.82 K. In terms of computational efficiency, the proposed model takes a total of 3.328 hours under the temperature rise condition, which is 258.65 times faster than the full-order three-dimensional model. Compared to the full-order field-circuit coupled model, the computational speed is increased by 5.1 times.
From the analysis of the model's computational results and the experimental data, the following conclusions can be drawn: (1) The proposed model has a maximum temperature error of 1.37 K compared to the experimental results, making it suitable for temperature rise calculations and winding hotspot analysis of converter transformers. (2) For oil-immersed self-cooled converter transformers, excluding the complete oil flow circulation with the radiator in temperature rise calculations may lead to significant deviations in both the magnitude and location of the winding hotspot temperature rise compared to actual conditions. (3) The proposed model effectively reduces computational costs through the thermal circuit coupling and POD order reduction methods. Compared to the full-order three-dimensional model, the computation speed is increased by 258.65 times, and compared to the full-order field-circuit coupled model, the computation speed is increased by 5.1 times, better meeting the timeliness requirements of digital twin models.