Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Transient CB Model PDF
Transient CB Model PDF
DOI 10.1007/s00202-008-0103-9
ORIGINAL PAPER
Received: 26 November 2007 / Accepted: 16 August 2008 / Published online: 9 September 2008
© Springer-Verlag 2008
Abstract In this paper, a simplified test method has been of the post-arc current produced by application of the initial
proposed and implemented for evaluating the thermal inter- transient recovery voltage to the breaker.
ruption capability of the power circuit breakers. In this The density of the rest plasma is dependent on the cur-
method, the influences of the arc voltage of the auxiliary rent fall rate before current zero, and the post-arc current
breaker on the evaluation of the thermal interruption limit of responsible for heating up the plasma is controlled by the
the circuit breaker can be eliminated. To validate the propo- conductivity of the rest plasma and the applied voltage. So,
sed test circuit, a series of experiments have been carried out it can be concluded that the thermal reignition is strongly
on a 24-kV SF6 gas circuit breaker with rated short circuit dependent on the rate of decrease in the current before cur-
of 25 kA and the successful interruption zone in terms of the rent zero as well as on the rate of increase in the recovery
time derivative of the current before current zero (di/dt) and voltage [1,2].
rate of increase in recovery voltage (dv/dt) has been deter- As the result to evaluate the limits of the interruption capa-
mined. bility of the circuit breakers, different currents and voltage
have to be applied to the circuit breaker. Some efforts have
Keywords Circuit breakers · Interruption capability test · been accomplished to perform some test related to thermal
Synthetic test · Thermal reignitions reignition using a full synthetic test method [3,4]. In some
other studies, a characteristic of the interruption capability
in terms of the time derivative of the current and rate of
1 Introduction increase in the applied voltage has been established [5,6].
The presence of an auxiliary breaker (AB) in a synthetic
Power circuit breakers play the most important role in pre- circuit is unavoidable. As the AB opens during the current
serving the stability of power networks and in decreasing flow through the test breaker, the voltage of the high current
the induced damages to power system utilities in the case of source is divided between AB and test breaker resulting in
any fault. Therefore, the determination of their interruption a reduction of the arc energy in test breaker as addressed in
capability limits seems to be necessary to be able to predict [7]. Also the distortion of the current waveshape near cur-
whether different faults can be cleared. Most of failures occur rent zero makes the evaluation of the limits of the thermal
in gas circuit breakers originate from a soft thermal collapse interruption capability of the circuit breakers erroneous.
of the gas insulation within less than microsecond after cur- In this paper, to eliminate the undesired effects of the arc
rent zero; the so-called thermal reignition, due to the increase voltage in synthetic test circuits, a test circuit is proposed
in the conductivity of the rest plasma resulted from the flow to evaluate the thermal limitation of the circuit breakers in
a more accurate way. The main objective of this method is
A. Karimi (B) · K. Niayesh based on the application of a recovery voltage with the redu-
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
ced amplitude but with the same rate of increase within the
e-mail: a.karimy@ece.ut.ac.ir first microseconds after current zero to the circuit breaker.
K. Niayesh
The proposed method is implemented to test a 24, 25 kA
e-mail: kniayesh@ut.ac.ir SF6 circuit breaker. It must be noted that with appropriate
123
524 Electr Eng (2009) 90:523–528
123
Electr Eng (2009) 90:523–528 525
123
526 Electr Eng (2009) 90:523–528
Fig. 6 A real TRV wave shape in comparison with an ideal (1-cos) Fig. 7 The ITRV along with its first and second derivative waveshapes
type
as marked with a dashed border in Fig. 5b. In this case, the impedance of the test circuit breaker are the most important
measured variation of the slope of TRV has been resulted at parameters, used to adjust the IRRRV. The influence of the
most 2% within a time interval of 2 µs with a delay time of arc energy input on the applied TRV waveshape has been
less than 0.2 µs. So, the produced ITRV has a linear form with considered by assuming a relatively constant arcing voltage
good approximation at least within the thermal zone while (in this case of about 300–400 V). The simulation results have
just a 10 resistance has been used in parallel branch. For been brought in Table 1.
higher amounts of resistance, the variations of TRV slop and The rate of change of the applied recovery voltage is also
delay time have been even decreased to about, respectively, time dependent. As shown in Fig. 7, the values used here are
1% and 0.1 µs. This fact is more evident in Fig. 6 in which those related to the time, where the second time derivative
the TRV wave shape shown in Fig. 5 in a real situation has of the recovery voltage is zero. These values are the same as
been compared with a simple (1-cos) waveshape in an ideal those calculated by the application of the proposed method
situation in the shape of a two-parameter envelop considered in the IEC standards [2], where the IRRRV is calculated as
by the IEC for the TRVs below than 75 kV. the slope of the line drawn between 20 and 80% points of the
ITRV peak.
2.2 Controlling the initial rate of increase in the recovery
voltage
3 Experimental results and validation
To be able to apply different stresses on circuit breaker, it is
necessary to change the initial rate of the recovery voltage In this section, the results of the experiments performed using
(IRRRV). For this purpose, a series RC branch in parallel to conventional synthetic circuit and the proposed method to
the breaker under test has been inserted. Indeed, the main obtain the thermal interruption limit of a 24 kV/25 kA SF6
reason of choosing the series RC branch is to reach the delay circuit breaker are reported. For this purpose, the resistances
times of about 0.2 µs and less. As the changes in capacitance corresponding to the critical IRRRVs have been obtained for
of the series RC do not have any tangible influence on IRRRV, each current via carrying out a number of tests in each step
a constant capacitance can be used and the IRRRV variations based on trial and error.
have been controlled solely by changing the amount of resis- Before the calculating the IRRRVs, the recorded signals
tance in different currents. It must be noted that replacing the has been denoised with wavelet in an offline manner without
RC branch by a resistor would result in the same IRRRVs, but using embedded low-pass filter. Denoising of the signal has
to avoid a galvanic connection between the contacts of the been performed by means of third-order Daubechies wavelet
breaker under test and to be able to implement the test circuit [8]. It must be noted that application of several other types
using resistances with lower power ratings, the RC branch of wavelet such as Symlets, Coiflets and Meyer yields the
is preferable. Since the IRRRV depends on the interrupted identical results [9].
short-circuit current also the distance to the first discontinuity Figure 8 shows the denoised voltage signal using wavelet
along the busbar, the IRRRV can be changed with changing in comparison with the original measured voltage waveshape
either the resistance or the short circuit current (or charging and the signal filtered using the embedded low-pass filter of
voltage of capacitors). the oscilloscope with the cut-off frequency of 20 MHz. As it
Analyzing the circuit shown in Fig. 2, the IRRRV can can be seen, in the case of application of a low-pass filter, an
be calculated for different short circuit currents and resis- undesired time shift in original signal appears, but applying
tances. The charging voltage of the capacitors and the parallel the wavelet method, this undesired effect can be avoided and
123
Electr Eng (2009) 90:523–528 527
Table 1 Calculated IRRRV values versus both of resistances and short circuit current
Current (kA) Resistance ()
10 20 50 100 300 600 1,000 2,000
123
528 Electr Eng (2009) 90:523–528
4 Conclusion
123