Current chopping phenomena of medium voltage circuit breakers

Abstract

The authors have investigated the relation between the circuit conditions and the chopping current values of various types of circuit breakers, including MOCB(Minimum Oil CB), VCB(Vacuum CB), ABCB (Air Blast CB) and GCB (SF6 Puffer CB). Excepting VCB, each breaker chopping current increases with increase of the parallel capacitance to the breaker, but it decreases when a series resistance is connected to this capacitance. Concerning to MOCB, ABCB and GCB, it was found that the phenomena just before current chopping quite resemble each other, while as for VCB, it differs from others completely. These were investigated throughly from experiments and theory.