A Method to Measure the Arc Energy in DC Circuit Breakers

A hybrid dc breaker is a piece of effective equipment in disrupting fault currents in dc systems due to their low path impedance during normal operation. As the generation of the arc is the major degrading factor in the mechanical switches, measuring the dissipated arc energy is targeted in this paper. A method based on capacitive storage voltage drop is used here to calculate the dissipated arc energy. Next, the hybrid dc breaker introduced in the author’s prior work is tested for the arc energy and compared with the conventional dc breaker. It is shown that up to 24% reduction in the arc energy is achievable via the proposed hybrid dc breaker at high fault currents.