A Novel Current Injection DC Circuit Breaker Integrating Current Commutation and Energy Dissipation

Abstract

Current injection DC interruption is considered one of the most promising and innovative technologies to address the need of fast fault isolation in medium-voltage DC systems due to its advantages in cost, conduction loss, and breaking capacity. In this paper, a novel current injection DC circuit breaker (DCCB) integrating the current commutation and energy dissipation is proposed. The symbiosis between the magnetic induction current commutation module (MICCM) and metal oxide varistor (MOV) eliminates the disadvantages in conventional current injection scheme, offering a cost effective solution for isolating faults while preserving large current breaking capability. With the circuit and structure parameters of MICCM optimized carefully based on the simulation analysis, a prototype of 10 kV DCCB is built, and its breaking performance is finally verified.