Loss and temperature rise of the skin effect electric heat tracing system

In actual operation, the skin effect electric heat tracing system is powered by the inverter circuit, and the higher harmonic components are inevitably introduced. There is not much research on the influence of harmonic current on the electric heat tracing load loss. In this paper, the harmonic distribution under PWM driving mode is analyzed, and the load loss of the electric heat tracing body under harmonic current is derived. The co-simulation method of PWM inverter circuit and skin electric heat tracing body coupling is proposed. The simulation results of current and loss of co-simulation method and sine wave driving method are compared. The results show that the parameters of PWM driving mode increase to different degrees, which proves the correctness of the joint simulation method. At the same time, the influence of the output characteristics and modulation parameters of the PWM inverter circuit on the load loss of the electric heat tracing body is analyzed, which provides a theoretical basis for the determination of the parameters of the inverter circuit. In addition, combined with multi-physics coupling analysis, this paper obtains more accurate temperature distribution results of the electric heat tracing system without scaling the size of the electric heat tracing ontology. Not only can we intuitively understand the material selection and hot spot configuration of the electric heat tracing components, but also further understand the influence of current harmonics on the load loss in actual operation, so as to better realize the efficient heat tracing of the skin electric heat tracing system.