• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2016.02a
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• pp.196.2-196.2
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• 2016

The design and development procedures of SF6 gas circuit breakers are still largely based on trial and error through testing although the development costs go higher every year. The computation cannot cover the testing satisfactorily because all the real processes arc not taken into account. But the knowledge of the arc behavior and the prediction of thermal plasmas inside SF6 interrupters by numerical simulations are more useful than those by experiments due to the difficulties to obtain physical quantities experimentally and the reduction of computational costs in recent years. In this paper, in order to get further information into the interruption process of a SF6 self-blast interrupter, which is based on the combination of thermal expansion and arc rotation, gas flow simulations with a CFD-arc modeling are performed during the whole switching process such as high-current period, pre-current zero period, and current-zero period. Through the complete work, the temperature of residual arcs as well as the breakdown index after current zero should be a good criterion to predict the dielectric capability of interrupters.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2007.05b
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• pp.2494-2499
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• 2007

Self-blast circuit breakers utilize the energy dissipated by the arc itself to create the required conditions for arc quenching during the current zero. The high-current simulation provides information about the mixing process of the hot PTFE cloud with $SF_6$ gas which is difficult to access for measurement. But it is also hard to simulate flow phenomenon because the flow in interrupter with high current, $SF_6$-PTFE mixture vapor and complex physical behavior including radiation, calculation of electric field. Using a commercial computational fluid dynamics(CFD) package, the conservation equation for the gas and temperature, velocity and electric fields within breaker can be solved. Results show good agreement between the predicted and measured pressure rise in the thermal chamber.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2011.07a
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• pp.1536-1537
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• 2011

The high-voltage circuit breaker plays an important role in the electrical system because there has been a need for suitable switching devices capable of initiating and interrupting the flow of the electric fault current. It continues as the contacts recede from each other and as the newly created gap is bridged by a plasma. The arc plasma happens inside the insulation nozzle of SF6 self-blast interrupter which is newly developed as the next-generation switching principle. The ablation of PTFE nozzle is caused by this high temperature medium, the PTFE vapor from the nozzle surfaces flows toward the outlets and the pressure chamber. The vapor makes the pressure of the chamber increased by heat and mass transfer from the arcing zone. Because the rate of ablation depends on the magnitude of applied current, it decreases when the current goes to zero. The compressed gas inside the chamber flows reversely toward the arc plasma during this moment. According to this principle, the arc can be cooled down and the fault current can be interrupted successfully. In this study, we calculate arc plasmas and thermal-flow characteristics caused by fault current interruption inside a SF6 self-blast interrupter, and to investigate the effect of PTFE ablation on the whole arcing history.