A Study on Vacuum Circuit Breaker Driving Mechanism

전공차단기 구동 메카니즘 연구

In these days the Vacuum Circuit Breaker(VCB) is used in most medium voltage level because VCB has merits of simple structure, long life, free maintenance and environment friendly characteristics. Most of VCBs adopt mechanical spring drive mechanism to operate vacuum interrupter, but this mechanism is composed of many components and needs frequent maintenance works. In this paper, we study about the VCB drive mechanism with Permanent Magnet Actuator (PMA). Design methods and design flows about PMA are presented. The magnetic equivalent circuit is used for elementary and detailed design to determine the size of PMA. Finite Element Method (FEM) analysis is performed to evaluate the behavior characteristics of PMA in both static and transient state. Finally we manufacture sample PMA and verify FEM analysis through experiments.