2017 Electrical Insulation Conference (EIC), Baltimore, MD, USA, 11 - 14 June 2017

Influence of Switching Properties of the

Disconnector on
Very Fast Transient Overvoltage
Huamao Zhan Member, IEEE, Shaofeng Duan, Linzhi Yao and Lin Zhao
Northern China Electric Power University

statistical results for several different switching speeds, the

Abstract—During switching operations of disconnectors in gas
insulated switchgear (GIS), very fast transient overvoltage (VFTO)
is generated due to multiple strikes across the switching contact.
Switching properties, such as switching speed and trapped charge,
have some impacts on VFTO behavior. In this paper, the VFTO
caused by switching operations of a disconnector in a 252kV GIS
was measured and analyzed with different switching speed. A
position sensitive detector was employed for measuring the gap
length simultaneously so as to get the variation of breakdown
voltage with the gap length. Experimental results show that the
highest VFTO magnitude was generated when the closing speed
was 0.7m/s. Results also indicate the polarity effect of the
breakdown voltage and the effect of the trapped charge. A
simulation method for the VFTO associated with the whole
switching operation of was proposed, in which these switching
properties were taken into consideration.
Index Terms—Disconnector, gas insulated switchgear, very fast
transient overvoltage, trapped charge
I. INTRODUCTION
I N gas insulated switchgear (GIS), several strikes occur when
the disconnector is operated, which lead to generation of very
fast transient overvoltage (VFTO). VFTO contributes to
flashover or ground faults, or even causes damage on the
insulation of GIS or transformers[1], [2]. As the switching
operation causes VFTO, some switching properties have great
impacts on VFTO.
During the closing or opening operation of a disconnector,
the SF6 gap strikes once the recovery voltage exceeds the
breakdown voltage. In this paper, the VFTO and the gap length
for each strike were measured simultaneously so as to get the
relationship between the breakdown voltage and the gap length,
which is included in the simulation of the VFTO.
The influence of switching speed has two sides[3], [4].
Somebody think that increasing the switching speed may cause
the decrease of the number of strikes and thereby lower VFTO.
Another view is that lower switching speed often leads to lower
trapped charge voltage and helps reduce VFTO. Based on
influence of switching speed on VFTO was analyzed.
The trapped charge lefts on the floating side are thought to
have effects on the VFTO levels, too[5]. Although the trapped
charge voltage is usually less than 0.3 p.u. for a slow speed
disconnector, there is still a need to estimate the effect of the
trapped charge. Whether or not the trapped charge voltage
decays over time is investigated too.
A simulation method for VFTO during the entire switching
operation was proposed, in which these switching properties
were included by using the Monte Carlo method.
II. EXPERIMENTS OF VERY FAST TRANSIENT OVERVOLTAGE
A. Experimental circuit and measurement system
The scheme diagram of the 252kV GIS test circuit is illustrated
in Fig. 1. The bus bar is open at one end and the pressure of SF6
is 0.5MPa. A 150kV, 15kVA test transformer provides the
power supply. C is the coupling capacitor of the test
transformer. A DC generator may provide certain trapped
charge voltage on the load side.
The experimental setup is shown in Fig. 2. VFTO was
measured using two capacitive voltage dividers, which were
mounted on the source side and the end of the bus bar
respectively (hand-hole 1 and hand-hole 2).The voltage rise
time of the divider (3.5ns) is sufficiently steep for measuring
the VFTO. The upper limit frequency for the measure system is
100 MHz, which is suitable to measure the transients of
megahertz[6].
A laser source was mounted on the head of the moving
contact of the disconnector. Once the moving contact moves,
the source emits laser, which is received by a PSD (position
sensitive detector) mounted on the hand-hole 3. The PSD
system has fine linearity. The error is less than 1.5 percentages.
As the VFTO measurement and the PSD were triggered
simultaneously, the variation of the breakdown voltage with the
gap length is gotten.

This work was supported in part by the grant from the Major State Basic
Research Development Program of China (973 program) (No.
2011CB209405-1) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.
51377055)
Zhan Huamao, Duan Shaofeng, Linzhi Yao, Lin Zhao are with the Beijing
Area Major laboratory of High Voltage & Electromagnetic Compatibility,
North China Electric Power University, Beijing 102206, China (e-mail:
zhanhm@ncepu.edu.cn)
978-1-5090-3967-8/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE 412
 BG1 BS BG2 300

DT DS 200

100

Voltage / kV
AS C DS
0

-100

-200

Fig. 1 Diagram of experimental circuit of VFTO

-300
-20 -10 0 10 20 30 40
Time / ms

Black line: voltage of the source side

Green line: voltage of the load side

Fig.4 Experimental VFTO waveform during opening operation

-50

Fig. 2 Diagram of 252kV GIS

-100

Voltage / kV
B. Experimental circuit and measurement system
-150
Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 show typical waveforms for the voltage of the
load and source side of the disconnector during closing and -200
opening operation respectively. At the beginning of the closing
operation, the strike leads to VFTO with high amplitude. The -250
strike occurs more frequently as the gap length becomes shorter,
meanwhile VFTO decreases. By contrast, the strike becomes -300
sparser as the gap length becomes longer during the opening -0.5 0 0.5
Time / us
1 1.5 2

operation, accompanied by increasing VFTO. For convenience,

Fig.5 Experimental VFTO waveform of a single breakdown
strikes with the absolute value of US-UL exceeding 0.2 p.u.
were regarded as meaningful strikes and be counted.
VFTO waveform for a single strike is shown in Fig. 5. Fast
Fourier Transform technique has been used to identify the
dominant frequency components of VFTO. As shown in Fig. 6,
low frequency components of VFTO were due to the voltage
collapse between the disconnector contacts, dominant high
frequency components are 4MHz, 15MHz, 28MHz, 42MHz.

400

300

200
Voltage / kV

100

0
Fig.6 Frequency spectrum for VFTO
-100

-200
III. SWITCHING PROPERTIES OF DISCONNECTOR
-300
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 During disconnector switching, strikes occur once the
Time / ms recovery voltage of the contact gap exceeds the breakdown
voltage of the SF6 gap. The recovery voltage of the gap is the
Black line: voltage of the source side
Green line: voltage of the load side
difference between the power supply voltage and the trapped
Fig.3 Experimental VFTO waveform during closing operation charge voltage on the load side. The switching speed influences
the striking number and the trapped charge voltage, and then
413
the amplitude of VFTO.
80%
A. Variation of breakdown voltage with gap length
The variation of breakdown voltage with gap length is shown
in Fig. 7. A linear regression was performed between these two 60%
variables, which yielded a linear correlation in both positive
breakdown voltage and negative breakdown voltage with gap

Probability
length. The polarity effect is observed in the statistical results of 40%
the breakdown voltage, that is, the positive breakdown voltage
is higher than the negative breakdown voltage. The variation
can be used in the simulation of the VFTO. 20%

500

400 U+=23.0*L 0%
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Breakdown voltage/kV

300
Breakdown times
200
(a) V=3.3m/s (Fast)
100

0
40%
-100

-200
30%
-300 U-=-20.6*L

Probability
-400

-500 20%
0 5 10 15 20 25

Gap length/mm
10%
Fig. 7 Linear regression between breakdown voltage and gap length

0% 0
B. Influence of switching speed on VFTO 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Breakdown times
For changing the switching speed, a spring energy
accumulation mechanism was mounted on the operator of the (b) V=1.5m/s (Medium)
disconnector. As the switching speed is not constant, it is
defined as the ratio of 20%-80% of the total switching distance 40%

to the time spent. The switching speed for the closing and
opening operator is shown in Table 1. The total operation 30%
number is 100. Fig. 8 and Fig. 9 show the distribution of the
Probability

striking number with different switching speeds. For closing

operation, the striking number decreases as the speed increases. 20%

For opening operation, the striking number reached the

maximum value at switching speed of 1.7m/s. 10%

TABLE I
SWITCHING SPEED 0% 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Switching speed (m/s)
Switching Breakdown times
Fast Medium Slow
Closing 3.3 1.5 0.7 (c) V=0.7m/s (Slow)
Opening 3.1 1.7 0.9 Fig. 8 Experimental results of striking number for closing

414
 TABLE II
VARIATION OF TRAPPED CHARGE VOLTAGE AND VFTO WITH SWITCHING SPEED
80%
DURING CLOSING
Trapped charge voltage
Switching speed VFTO (p.u.)
(p.u.)
60% (m/s)
Maximum Average Maximum Average
3.3 1.41 0.99 0.80 0.43
Probability

Closing 1.5 1.47 1.01 0.81 0.41

40%
0.7 1.79 1.06 0.92 0.46
3.1 1.50 0.64 - -
Opening 1.7 1.69 0.93 - -
20%
0.9 1.58 0.82 - -

0% 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 C. Trapped charge and its decay behavior

Breakdown times
After each opening operation, the trapped charge remains on
(a) V=3.1m/s (Fast) the load side, which will affect the VFTO for the next closing
operation. As the trapped charge is randomly generated by the
40% disconnector opening, it is not easy to evaluate its effect on
VFTO. Therefore, a dc generator was used to provide a trapped
30%
charge voltage on the load side. The trapped charge voltage was
set to -196kV (-1.0p.u.) for experiments with pre-setup trapped
Probability

charge. VFTOs with and without pre-setup trapped charge were

20%
compared as shown in Table3. The experimental results are
based on 100 times operations.
10% TABLE III
EFFECT OF TRAPPED CHARGE ON VFTO
VFTO (p.u.)
0% Maximum Average
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
With pre-setup trapped charge 1.79 1.06
Breakdown times Without pre-setup trapped charge 1.78 1.45
(b) V=1.7m/s (Medium)
In the interval of two strikes, the trapped charge may leak
40% along the surface of the insulator, which leads to the decay of
the trapped charge voltage. The decay characteristic was
30%
obtained experimentally. A dc voltage of 50kV was applied on
the load side of the circuit, then the auxiliary disconnector (DS2)
Probability

was opened. An electrostatic voltmeter was employed to

20%
10%
0% 0 1 2 3 4
Breakdown times
(c) V=0.9m/s (Slow)
Fig. 9 Experimental results of striking number for opening
The switching speed affects the striking number, thus also
impacting the VFTO amplitude. For opening operation, the
maximum value of VFTO occurs as the striking number
reaches the maximum value with the speed of 1.7m/s. For
closing operation, the trapped charge voltage also influences
the VFTO, which decreases as the speed increases, along with
the striking number and the trapped charge voltage. To some
extent, high switching speed may be a way for decreasing the
VFTO.
Table 2 shows the variation of maximum and average
VFTOs with different switching speed. For closing operation,
the maximum and average trapped charge voltages are shown
too.
415
measure the voltage on the load side. It is found that the trapped
charge voltage decayed slowly with decay time constant of
about 160 minutes. Neglecting decay in simulation is supported
by the experiment.
5 6 7 8 9 IV. VFTO SIMULATION METHOD
During the closing or opening operation, a number of strikes
occur and each strike lasts several microseconds. ATP is often
used to simulate the VFTO generated by single strike and the
time step of 1nanosecond or less is adopted. Generally, the
voltage on the supply side and load side of the disconnector
before the strike is assumed as 1p. u. and -1p. u. separately to
get the severest VFTO. The simulation method is conservative
and doesn’t include above mentioned switching properties.
For disconnectors with low switching speed, their opening or
closing operations often occupy several milliseconds. The time
step of 1 nanosecond is too short to simulate the VFTO
generated during the entire operation. Therefore, a simulation
method is proposed, in which two types of time steps are
adopted for improving the efficiency. Once the gap strikes,
VFTO is simulated by using the shorter time step. A longer
time step is used to simulate the voltage for the rest. The VFTO
waveform for the entire operation is hence obtained.
 For including the randomness of the breakdown voltage and
the initial phase of the voltage on the supply side, the Monte 300

Carlo method is employed, thus the statistical results for

200
simulated VFTO is obtained. The simulation procedure is
shown in Fig. 10. 100

Voltage / kV
By using above mentioned simulation method, the VFTO
waveform for the entire operation is gotten. 0

Begin (t=0)
-100

Initial phase randomization

-200

-300
-20 -10 0 10 20 30 40

Closed / Open Time / ms

NO
NO
Black line: voltage of the source side
Green line: voltage of the load side
t=t+Δt ,Steady-state Calculation
Fig. 12 Simulation waveform of VFTO during opening

NO

Breakdown voltage calculation and randomization

V. CONCLUSION

Breakdown
Switching properties of disconnectors have a great impact on
VFTO. VFTO Experiments on a 252kV GIS were performed
YES and the variation of breakdown voltage with different gap
length was obtained experimentally. Despite the random
t=t+δ t , Current initialation behavior, the breakdown voltage has polarity effect, which
should be included in the simulation of VFTO. Experimental
YES Arc resistance calculation，Transient results at different switching speed show that the VFTO
Calculation
magnitude with closing speed of 0.7m/s is the maximum.
Decreasing striking number means small possibility of VFTO
Deviat ion bet ween calculation and
with high amplitude. The trapped charge voltage on the load
initialation of current exceeds 5% side damps slowly. Based on the Monte Carlo method, a
simulation method including these switching properties is
proposed. The simulation results of VFTO distribution are
YES
basically consistent with the experimental ones.
Pass calculated value to initial value

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End
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-200
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Black line: voltage of the source side

Green line: voltage of the load side
Fig. 11 Simulation waveform of VFTO during closing

416