A Study on the Characteristics of High-Current Arc Plasma Influenced by Axial Magnetic Field

축방향 자기장에 의한 대전류 아크 특성에 관한 연구

The vacuum interrupter (VI) is widely used in medium-voltage switching circuits due to its abilities and advantages as an environmental friendly circuit breaker. An understanding of the vacuum arc flow phenomena is very important for improving the performance of vacuum interrupter. In order to closely examine the vacuum arc phenomena, it is necessary to predict the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) characteristics by the multidisciplinary numerical modeling, which is coupled with the electromagnetic and the thermal flow fields, simultaneously. In this study, we have investigated arc plasma constriction phenomena and an effect of AMF on the arc plasma with the high-current vacuum arcs for the cup-type AMF electrode by using a commercial finite element analysis (FEA) package, ANSYS. The simulation results applied with various AMFs and constant Joule heat generation show that strong axial magnetic field (AMF) permits the arc to be maintained in a diffused mode to a high-current vacuum arc. However, further studies are required on the two-way coupling method and radiation model for arc plasma in order to accomplish the advanced analysis method.