Assessment of various kinds of AC black-box arc models for DC circuit breaker

Abstract

Many computational techniques which could analyze the behavior of electrical arc have been utilized to estimate the interrupting ability of the circuit breakers. Among them, black-box arc model has been known for valuable tool to simulate dynamic arc-circuit interactions during fault current interruption. Previous research works has shown that the black-box model was efficient tool to analyze AC arc characteristics especially for SF6 and air circuit breakers. But there's no noticeable investigations about the application of black box model to the DC circuit breakers, which is widely used in DC railway systems and DC microgrid. In this work, we tried to verify the validity of the applications of conventional AC black-box model to the DC electric arc. Several conventional arc models containing Cassie and Schwarz model were analyzed considering the tendency of the dc arcing current and voltage waveform using parametric sweep method. Simulation results showed that the weakness of current AC black-box model for DC arc analysis and compared that which model is more suitable for analyzing the DC arc.