System Simulation of High Voltage Circuit Breaker using Multi Object Optimization

Various interrupter variables affect breaking performance of high-voltage circuit. Computational fluid dynamics(CFD) is the most widely used method to analyze these performances precisely. Using CFD to simulate switching operation with breaking current, however, takes days or weeks due to its complex non-linear physics of the arc phenomena. This paper introduces system simulation method which solves its internal phenomena numerically with simplified governing equations for each components to high-voltage circuit breakers. The computation time of system simulation is up to a few minutes, it could be appropriate to adapt to the early development stage to reduce trial and error. Temperature, pressure, density and dielectric strength of the gas and so on affect the breaking performance simultaneously – these factors are of conflicting characteristics to each other, minimizing or maximizing one factor to improve the performance is not suitable for circuit breaker’s optimization. Multi object optimization gives a set of trade-off optimal solutions using an evolutionary algorithm. In this research, the system simulation model was validated by actual synthetic test result and specified factors suitable to interrupting duties. Multi object optimization method was implemented to draw out the best combination of parameters from dozens of cases to improve the performance of the circuit breaker.