• Journal of the Korean Society for Railway
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.597-603
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• 2012

The cases for selecting contact materials of Ag and AgC for Bias Track Relay are the studies and their safety evaluations are proposed in this paper. The welding at the relative low current has occurred in Ag contacts, but the one has not occurred in AgC contacts although the high currents flow since it has an excellent temperature characteristic. In the repetitive switching experiment, more unstable resistance and transfer phenomena has occurred in contacts as the switching numbers of AgC contacts increase, which results in more consumption of contacts. In the experiments, there exists a trade off relationship between welding and resistance variation. AgC contacts have excellent characteristics in welding, but the caution is required in using them since a lot of repetition switching produces much resistance variation. However, Ag contacts have excellent characteristics in repetitive switching, but weak ones in welding.