Design of test system for arc fault protection switch

The growing tendency of the abnormity and accident which caused by arc fault has already become the social harmfulness in the power system. With the extensive use of electrical equipment, arc fault has the features of randomness, which further increase the difficulty to recognize arc and set higher requirement on the performance of arc fault protection switch. In this paper, a comprehensive test system is developed to generate arc and study the characteristics of arc fault on the basis of integrated design and multi-threading technique. Then the effectiveness and credibility of arc fault simulation devices have been verified and the characteristics of arc fault are analyzed under different loads. Experiments show that characteristic of arc fault are influenced by the fault reasons and load in series. The system can meet the requirements of arc fault protection switch research, and can provide experimental condition and data support for the research of arc fault detection technique.