A fuse-based DC circuit breaker with vacuum interrupter enhanced by an external transverse magnetic field

Abstract

Due to the increasing power system capacity, the interruption of large fault currents has gradually become a major challenge in power systems. At the moment, such currents are interrupted mainly via circuit breakers based on the method of active current commutation. However, these types of circuit breakers tend to be costly and oversized. One possible alternative—a fuse-based circuit breaker with current commutation process enhanced by an external transverse magnetic field (ETMF)—is proposed by the authors. Its main advantage lies in the fast current commutation achieved by an ETMF-enhanced three-stage increase of the vacuum arc voltage. The study of the current commutation process is mainly represented by the authors, and the influencing factors of the current commutation—contact opening speed and ETMF current—are discussed. At last, the proposed circuit breaker is verified by an experiment, whose results show that a short-circuit current of 42 kA can be interrupted within just 2 ms.