Analysis and Design of Gate Controlless Hybrid Circuit Breaker Utilizing SiC-JFET for Low Voltage DC System

This paper proposes a gate controlless hybrid circuit breaker (HCB) for a low voltage DC system. The proposed HCB utilizes a JFET in its gate circuit and solves the problem that the conventional gate controlless HCB can not separate the current commutation and interruption. This paper analyses operation of the proposed HCB and clarifies its design strategy. Experimental verification at 400 V, 4 A compares the cutoff performance of the gate controlless HCB with and without JFET. The experimental results show a 61 % loss reduction in the semiconductor switch and superiority of arcing prevention in the proposed method. In addition, the proposed HCB also achieved DC 400 V, 50 A interruption in the experiment.