Industrial applications of high-, medium- and low-voltage arc modelling

A hydrodynamic model for electrical arc modelling, which takes into account Joule heating, radiation, Lorentz forces, arc - wall interactions and real-gas effects, was applied to study high-, medium- and low-voltage circuit breakers. The first industrial application deals with a high-voltage puffer circuit breaker. Ablation of the nozzle material in this kind of circuit breaker has been studied with the model. The second industrial application presents an self-blast medium-voltage circuit breaker, based on the combination of thermal expansion and the arc-rotation principle. The temperature between the contacts just after the current zero has been evaluated experimentally and numerically. The comparison between these results is discussed. Lastly, the arc commutation in a low-voltage circuit breaker has been simulated. The results show that, in this type of experimental set-up, the interaction among the electrical arc, the flow and the Lorentz force is preponderant.