Application of Surge Arrester in Limiting Voltage Stress at DC Breaker

Abstract

Three categories of DC breakers; namely, static, mechanical, and hybrid dc breakers are currently available. DC circuit breakers have been considered for DC system protection with the development of DC generations, loads and circuits. In our previous work, authors introduced a bipolar hybrid circuit breaker, which keeps the switching voltage overshoots within source voltage limit. The breaker model had the limitation of being only effective when placed close to the dc source where the inductance between source and breaker is negligible. This paper introduces a modification of the proposed hybrid breaker to make it suitable for anywhere along a dc line. According to the results, the proposed method can effectively break the fault current while causing minimal arcing and significantly reducing the voltage stress across the mechanical switches, while it can be used throughout the dc line.