• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers B
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• v.50 no.7
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• pp.331-337
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• 2001

With the increasing reliability of analysis schemes and the dramatically increased calculating speed, the computer simulation has become and indispensable process to predict the interruption capacity of circuit breakers. Generally, circuit breakers have to possess both the small current and large current interruption abilities and the circuit breaker designers need to evaluate its capacities to save the time and the expense. The analysis of small current and the large current interruption performances have been considered separately because the phenomena occurring in a interrupter are quite different. To analyze the dielectric recovery after large current interruption many physical phenomena such as heat transfer, convection and arc radiation, the nozzle ablation, the ionization of high temperature SF(sub)6 gas, the electric and themagnetic forces and so forth mush be considered. However, in the analysis of small current interruption performance only the cold gas flow analysis needs to be carried out because the capacitive current is to small that the influence from the current can be neglected. In this paper, an empirical equation which is obtained from a series of tests to estimate the dielectric recovery strength has been applied to a real circuit breaker. The results of analysis have been compared with the test results and the reliability has been investigated.