Development of a Predictive Model for Assessing the Risk of Damage to End Cable Couplings, Taking into Account the Influence of External Factors

The article is devoted to the urgent problem of ensuring the reliability of electrical grid equipment under the infl uence of aggres- sive environmental factors. Despite the existence of existing methods for predicting failures of transmission line elements, most of them are long-term in nature and do not take into account the dynamic infl uence of climatic parameters on the technical condition of nodes in the op- erational period. The paper proposes an author's mathematical model for the operational assessment of the risk of damage to the end cable couplings of an outdoor installation. The model is based on a com- prehensive analysis of cause-and-effect relationships, which made it possible to identify key destructive factors: design features, current current load, absolute values and gradients of ambient air tempera- ture, humidity, solar radiation, as well as a specifi c wind-cold index. The methodological basis of the study was the Risk Scoring method, adapted to the tasks of the electric power industry. The developed empirical model allows us to calculate the risk index as a weighted algebraic sum of infl uencing factors, where the weighting coeffi cients are determined based on statistical analysis of the failure rate or expert assessments in case of data shortage. Based on the risk index, the probability of trouble-free operation is calculated, correlated with one of the four zones of the hazard level scale, which makes it possible to automate decision-making in order to avoid the transition of the cur- rent state of the end couplings to a critical one. The proposed approach makes it possible to switch from maintenance scheduling to actual risk management, which signifi cantly increases the operational reliability of cable systems in diffi cult climatic conditions.