Hybrid and solid-state breakers offer new possibilities in the power grid by enabling faster switching, and by simplifying dc breaking. However, they consists of expensive power electronic components that are sensitive to overvoltage transients and require energy absorbing elements mounted in parallel. At turn-off, the rapidly decreasing current in the power electronic switch and the presence of an inherent stray inductance leads to hazardous overvoltage transients across the breaker. This paper investigates the possibility to split the overvoltage protection and energy absorption into two separate components. By optimizing the voltage ratio between two varistors, one can dimension a small electronics varistor for overvoltage protection and a large power electronics varistor for energy absorption. With this setup the power electronics varistor is allowed to be in a circuit with a large stray inductance and can thus be placed further away without causing an uncontrolled overvoltage. It is shown both in circuit simulations as well as in a small-scale experiment that if the voltage ratio between the two varistors is large enough, the inner varistor only has to absorb 1-2% of the system energy.Index Terms-DC breaker, metal oxide varistor (MOV), overvoltage protection, snubber circuit, solid-state circuit breaker.

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Standard estimation of top-oil temperature uses a thermal model related to load changes and variation of ambient temperature. Attempts have been done to improve the accuracy of top-oil temperature calculations by introducing internal properties into the model i.e. oil viscosity and winding resistance. The interest of this paper is to investigate the effect of external factors on top-oil temperature by looking into the weather, i.e. wind velocity. The results are compared with measurements on a 63MVA-ONAF 55/140 kV transformer unit, which is operated in ONAN cooling mode. The unit is located in subarctic climate, and it is equipped with a monitoring system and a weather station.