SF₆ Experimental Study on the Variation Characteristics of Closing Prebreakdown Duration during Contact Deterioration of Circuit Breakers

Abstract

The contact morphology change caused by high-current ablation will seriously affect the electric field distribution in the interrupter chamber, which in turn affects the closing prebreakdown arc duration, indicating that the prebreakdown arc duration can be used as one of the indicators to measure the contact ablation state. A circuit breaker simulated ablation test platform was established, and the voltage and current signals, electromagnetic field signals, and vibration signals in the process of circuit breaker closing were measured, and the closing prebreakdown duration was calculated. The results show that under the same size of the ablation current, with the ablation of the contacts, the closing prebreakdown duration shows an overall trend of increasing and then decreasing, and the larger the ablation current is, the larger the change in the closing prebreakdown duration is. At the same time, simulation verification was carried out, and the results show that the electric field distortion on the surface of the static arc contact inside the arc extinguishing chamber is the largest, and the ablation of the contact will further increase the degree of distortion of the electric field inside the arc extinguishing chamber. As the degree of ablation increases, the prebreakdown moment of the circuit breaker closing is advanced, and the prebreakdown duration increases.

Keywords

• SF₆ circuit breaker
• prebreakdown characteristic
• contact ablation
• multi-physics simulation