With the growing need for digital approaches in project planning and management, the past decade has witnessed a significant rise in the adoption of Building Information Modeling (BIM), which is now expanding into numerous professional fields. In the field of power engineering, there has been a steady increase in the use of cable systems for electric power transmission, where the proper dimensioning of such systems is essential to ensure their reliable and efficient operation. Although several dedicated software solutions for cable dimensioning are available on the market, most do not offer direct integration with BIM tools.
In this thesis, the possibility of linking a BIM model of a high-voltage cable system with a program developed in the FreeFEM environment—an open-source software tool for numerically solving thermal conditions using the finite element method—was investigated. The connection between the two systems was enabled through a custom-developed interface written in the Python programming language, employing the open-source IfcOpenShell library.
Thermal analyses of the cable system were carried out and compared with the results obtained from a dedicated commercial cable dimensioning program called Cableizer. The final part of the thesis presents a practical case study of selecting an appropriate power cable based on a real-world engineering example. Using the custom-developed interface, it was demonstrated that a BIM model can be effectively integrated or linked with any specialized program for calculating cable thermal conditions. Furthermore, the analysis of the influence of various factors on power cable installation confirmed that the obtained results are highly comparable to those generated by dedicated software tools, thereby validating the accuracy and applicability of the developed approach.
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