Digital Testing of High Voltage

Circuit Breaker
 Presented by
 G.Sree Vidya
 182T1A0214
 Electrical and Electronics Engineering
 Dr.KV Subba Reddy College of Engineering for

Women’s
Outlines
 Introduction
 Need for testing
 Testings of circuit breaker
 Digital testing
 Advantages and Disadvantages
 Applications
 Conclusions
 Introduction
 What is circuit breaker?
 A Circuit breaker can make or break a

circuit,either manually or automatically under

all conditions viz.no-load,full-load and
short-circuit conditions.
 History
 The first circuit breaker was developed by
J.N.Kelman in 1901.It was the predecessor of the
oil circuit breaker and capable of interrupting a
short circuit current of 200 to 300 Ampere in a
40KV system.
 The circuit breaker was made up of two wooden
barrels containing a mixture of oil and water in
which the contacts were immersed.
 Now a days one pole of circuit breaker is capable
of interrupting 63KA in a 500KV network with
SF6 gas as the are quenching medium.
Essential qualities of hv circuit
breaker
 In closed position they are good conductors.
 In open position they are excellent insulators.
 They can close a shorted circuit quickly and

safely without unacceptable contact errosion.

 They can interrupt a rated short-circuit

current or lower current quickly without

generating an abnormal voltage.
Need for testing of hv circuit
breakers
 When an overload or a circuit occurs in the
home or industry,the usual result is a blown
fuse or a tripped circuit breaker.
 Circuit breakers are mechanical devices,which

are subject to deterioration due to

wear,corrosion and environmental
contamination,any of which could cause the
device to remain closed during a fault
condition.
TESTING OF CIRCUIT BREAKERS
 Routine tests
 Type tests
 Digital testing
A project stated with the following
parties:
 KEMA high power laboratories The

Netherlands.
 Delft University of technology,The

Netherlands.
 Siemens AG,Germany
 RWE Energy,Germany
 Aim of digital testing
 Developing digital testing of hv circuit
breakers.ie., a software product for testing a
model of such a device,once its characteristic
fingerprints are obtained from refined
measurements during standard tests.
 Digital offers a wide range of new possibilities
for users,manufactures,standardizing bodies
and test laboratories for fine tuning circuit
breaker abilities in relation with standard and
real power systems.
Measurement & data analysis
A tailor made high frequency measuring system was
realized for this purpose.
 This system consists a number of battery

powered,single channel 40MHz 12bit AD converters

each storing data temporarily in on board local
RAM(256k samples each)
 The arc voltage is measured with standard board

band R C R type voltage dividers.

 Current is measured with a special Rogowski coil.

 After the remote RAM is filled,data is transmitted

serially through optical fibres to the processing unit

in the command centre.
 continues.....
 The system relies heavily on digital signal processing
methods for reconstructing the actual voltage and
current signals from the raw sensor output.
 Tests in various laboratories have proven that the

system can measure post-arc current as small as

50mA,milliseconds after the interruption of many tens
of Ka.
 The total number of attempts,the result of the attempt

i.e., failure or success was predicted correctly in more

than 90% of the cases by evaluating the characteristics
of the arc behaviour with model.
ARC-CIRCUIT INTERACTION
SOFTWARE-
 All the final stage of the realization of digital
testing measured are model parameters will
be used as input for the arc model.
 The integration of differential algebric

equations(DAE)by means of the backward

differentiation formula(BDF)method has been
chosen in developing a new software package
for electrical transients computation.
 The program is in use at several high-power

and high-voltage laboratories in the world.

 Advantages
 Estimation of circuit breaker’s interrupting
limit.
 Reduction of full scale testing in high-power

laboratories.
 Acceleration at development of new circuit

breaker design.
 Monitoring the aging process of circuit

breaker in service.
 Expansion of services for high-power

laboratories.
 Disadvantages
 Testing in costlier
 Testing is time consuming.
 A tough procedure.
APPLICATIONS OF DIGITAL TESTING
 Influence of parallel capacitance

Performance Near Remote

CT 1 (200pF) 1.9 1.2
CT 2 (400pF) 2.4 1.4

Influence of a current transformer

 CONCLUSION
 Digital testing gives precise information
about the breaker,as obtained from
laboratory tests.
 This is useful for the development of future

standards.
 The performance of a circuit breaker whose

finger prints are obtained from real tests can

be estimated in other circuits also.
THANK YOU