Improvement of Dielectric Recovery Performance for Self Blast Circuit Breaker

The self-blast type circuit breaker has been developed to reduce mechanical operation energy by building up the pressure of arc extinguishing gas flow from the heat of the arc itself. Unlike a puffer type, breaking performance for self-blast type are influenced and sensitive by various factors inside interrupter parts, such as the nozzle structure, chamber shape as well as amplitude of short circuit current. These days, particularly, it has been difficult to secure a low current breaking performance as the circuit breaker has been compacted. The currents for breaking test duties belong to from 10% to 30% of the rated breaking current in accordance with IEC standard. Although the arc energy for interruption is lower than the rated breaking current test duties, the breaking performance could be lower than the tests because the transient recovery voltage (TRV) after the current zero is relatively high. The capability of interruption is related to dielectric recovery after the arc quenching. Therefore, a complex analytical method is needed to secure the breaking performance for the current and to improve the performance by using the limited gas flow inside the interrupter parts. In this paper, it described the techniques to verify breaking performance such as hot gas flow analysis and dielectric analysis. And it has studied a method for improving the performance with various design parameters using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) programs and high power laboratory test. Finally, this paper shows us the improvement of dielectric recovery performance for the self-blast type circuit breaker.