Fundamental experiments on surge characteristics of submarine cables connected with offshore wind farms

In offshore wind farms, cables between a wind turbine and another one or a substation on the land run into mediums with different resistivity - in the air, the sea and the earth. In such cases, wave distortion of a propagating surge is expected on the cable. This paper carried out a fundamental experiment to confirm influence of surrounding mediums around a submarine cable connected with an offshore wind farm using a coaxial cable which is immersed to salt sea water. Sheath currents might be affected by the components of mode 0, so-called “earth return mode”, which reflects at an interface between different kinds of mediums. However, mode 0 is small in sea, because resistivity of which is quite small. On the contrary, it is necessary to consider surge propagation-characteristics of the submarine connecting cable near the mouth of a river, on a lake and so on, because resistivity of fresh water is not enough small.