A Hybrid-Approach for Realtime Assessment of the Pressure and Erosion in Vacuum Circuit Breakers

This paper presents a hybrid-approach based on the establishment of a relationship between diagnostic signals, vacuum pressure and contact erosion of vacuum circuit breakers (VCBs). The signals used for this real-time diagnosis comprise of the level of chopped-current, dielectric strength, and the field emission current. The proposed approach has been verified against authentic experiments and the results indicate an acceptable agreement between the estimated values by approach and experiments.