Investigation of Arc Behavior in HVDC LC Resonance Circuit Breaker Using Flexible Pulsed DC-Source

Abstract

As the multi-terminal HVDC systems are expanding, the needs for a HVDC circuit breaker is being enhanced to eliminate the adverse effects of a single pole fault on the whole system. However, there are challenges of dc interrupting that is due to the absence of the natural current zero point and the large rate of fault current (di / dt), which results in enormous interrupting energy. Therefore, the suitable circuit breaker topology that satisfy dc interrupting requirements have been widely studied. The passive resonance circuit breaker (PRCB) is one of the circuit breaker topologies that have been considered for HVDC system, and it is necessary to investigate the arc characteristics occurring in the main circuit breaker during opening operation. In this paper, a dc current source that generates a current pulse using semiconductor device IGBT switch and pre-charged capacitor was modeled, and Mayr black box model was used for analysis of arc characteristics. Unlike the conventional current source that generates the dc arc current using the L and C, the new current source can be arbitrarily selected for the current shape and the current slope without hardware modification and was used for measuring the steady state and transient state voltage-current characteristics of the switching arc. The black box Mayr model parameter values were calculated elaborately through the enhanced current source and the Levenberg-Marquardt Algorithm (LMA) widely used in the optimization technique was applied to the Mayr model to optimize the parameter values.