Industrial applications of high-, medium- and low-voltage arc modelling

Abstract

A hydrodynamic model for electrical arc modelling, which takes into account Joule heating, radiation, Lorentz forces, arc - wall interactions and real-gas effects, was applied to study high-, medium- and low-voltage circuit breakers. The first industrial application deals with a high-voltage puffer circuit breaker. Ablation of the nozzle material in this kind of circuit breaker has been studied with the model. The second industrial application presents an self-blast medium-voltage circuit breaker, based on the combination of thermal expansion and the arc-rotation principle. The temperature between the contacts just after the current zero has been evaluated experimentally and numerically. The comparison between these results is discussed. Lastly, the arc commutation in a low-voltage circuit breaker has been simulated. The results show that, in this type of experimental set-up, the interaction among the electrical arc, the flow and the Lorentz force is preponderant.

Effect of vibrational degrees of freedom on the heat transfer in polyatomic gases confined between parallel plates

“…(16) and introducing the dimensionless quantities of Eq. (15) along with the dimensionless reduced distributions F ¼ t 0F =n 0 , L ¼L=ðn 0 t 0 Þ, H ¼ t 0Ĥ =P 0 and K ¼ t 0K =P 0 the following system of kinetic equations may be obtained in vector form: c y @W @y …”

“…A typical example of low excitation temperature gases is SF 6 , which is used in power plants (gas insulator switchgears and circuit breakers), in the electronics industry (plasma etching and chemical vapor deposition), in the magnesium production (die casting) and in other applications including gas-air tracing, leak detection, soundproof windows, etc. [15][16][17]. Other gases with moderate excitation temperatures may be involved in piezoelectric sensing technologies [18,19] at high temperatures (>800°C) in the automotive industry and in micro-electro-mechanical systems for aeronautics and space applications (e.g.…”

3-D Magnetostatic Moment Method Dedicated to Arc Interruption Process Modeling

“…The core of the arc system modeling [3], [4] is based on the commercial software FLUENT. It uses a finite-volume method solver to compute the fluid dynamics.…”

Calculation of involved energies in thermal plasma at the opening of high voltage breakers

“…Thermal exchanges in high voltage breakers plasmas have been the subject of numerous dimensional models development (1D, 2D, 3D) achieved on complex geometries where few justifications are made as for the limit conditions than for the meshing [6,9,13,14,15]. These models are more useful for breakers design phase, whereas their operating control needs for time dependent data.…”