Dynamical model of a fault phenomenon and reliability analysis for a circuit breaker in a vibration environment

Abstract

A circuit breaker often has a fault phenomenon in an electrical circuit, for example, its two contacts are kept away under a vibration environment. This will cause its electrical system not work normally. In the paper, a dynamical model is proposed for the circuit breaker applied with a low voltage under a vibration disturbance when the circuit breaker system is simplified as a cart-inverted pendulum system. Through some mechanical analyses, the nonlinear property of the circuit breaker is studied, and the fault phenomenon of the breaker in the vibration environment is described. With some simulations and experiments, the theoretical model is verified effectively when the circuit break is viewed as a switch in the electric system. Furthermore, the minimum amplitudes of a sinusoidal acceleration applied on the system to make the breaker have a fault phenomenon in the simulations are in good agreement with that in the experiments. Therefore, the dynamical model for representing the fault property of the circuit breaker is demonstrated feasibly with simulations and experiments.