Simulation of electrical contact wear on the rough surfaces of ultra-high-voltage transmission line fittings

A novel electrical contact wear simulation method was proposed to characterize the electrical contact wear of fittings in ultra-high-voltage transmission lines by combining line fittings with the Archard wear model and oxidation loss theory. In this method, a three-dimensional (3D) rough body was generated by using the Weierstrass–Mandelbrot fractal function to simulate the contact surface. An electrical contact wear subroutine was developed, and the wear state was updated using arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian adaptive grid technology. Finally, finite element software was used to perform thermal stress wear coupled analysis. The results show that the wear volume, wear depth and friction temperature obtained by the rough electric contact model were 2.71 times, 4.21 times and 2.18 times of the common ideal plane model, respectively. In the rough model, the wear depth of the nodes initially accelerated, subsequently slowed down, and again accelerated with time. The friction high temperature region was distributed in a point pattern, and the temperature difference between the contact region and the non-contact region became obvious.