Simulation of power feeding system for the mesh-like scientific underwater cable network ARENA

The ARENA is a scientific underwater cable network having a mesh-like cable topology. It will deploy many kinds of sensors in a vast research area in the deep sea, and will provide long-term continuous data. In order to made it possible to adopt the constant current power feeding system, which has many advantages including robustness against cable shunt faults, a current-to-current converter was proposed in a preceding paper. Because of the huge system scale and because of usage of the seawater as a current pass, the analysis of the operation and the stability only can be done with computer simulations. The authors conducted computer simulations and confirmed that (a) the cable system can be started up at a short risetime, and (b) the system can continue power feeding even if a cable shunt fault happens.