• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.36-41
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• 2012

Electrical Connections often cause fires due to poor contact. Occurrence rate of these fires tends to increase annually. The reason why poor contacts occur is often because it is the low mechanical pressure at the contact points. A typical connection method using mechanical pressure is a screw terminal type. This study reviewed these poor contact cases in the screw terminals. In order to get reproduction of such cases, two types of experiments were conducted. the first one was conducted under the normal contact condition, and the other one was conducted under the poor contact condition that screw terminal of breaker was loosen and did not meet the requirements of toque value. In both types of experiments, compulsory vibration was adopted as a variable to aggravate poor contacts. Each of various current values(4.5A, 9.0A, 13.5A) is input. In these experiments, relationships of a contact, electrical signal such as current and electric pulse by ZCT and thermal characteristics according to vibration effect are analyzed. The suggested data and results in this study provide the useful resources helping to investigate fires due to poor contact, and they develop the detector for poor contact and finally reduce the electrical fire occurrence rate.