Next step progress of the switching capacity of vacuum interrupter and plasma opening switch combination

Abstract

Summary form only given. One of the problems of the vacuum interrupter and plasma opening switch combination is adaptation of construction, power engineering and mechanical to the progress break of current of over 50-90kA. The eye of the problem is that velocity V of interrupter mobile electrode does not above 1-2m/sec under pneumatic drive and 10m/sec with electro- dynamical drive. When vacuum gap is 10mm time of mobile electrodes is 10-2 sec to 10-3 sec (correspondingly). When current increase (over 10-15kA), the time of current zero are increases significantly [1]. Therefore, even if forced of current zero break offered to consideration in [2] is used, the sum of the mentioned energies may be very large. Since this energy must be accumulated in capacitor banks having low density of energy and high cost so their cost and volume may exceed the same parameters of inductive storage. The technical solution was offered in article [3,4] - countercurrent breaking by vacuum interrupter combined in parallel with vacuum switch, which enables to decrease temperature effect on mobile electrodes and so to decrease time recovery of the gap. In this case the main thermal load is transferred to a parallel breaking device, for example, vacuum discharges of trigger type. One of the technical solutions applied to construction of the combined opening switch (COS) is offered to consideration in this paper. The COS construction has several details which enable to combine in single vacuum volume an additional vacuum discharge parallel to the vacuum breaker. Vacuum discharge is imparted oscillatory motion along electrodes in the process transient period (time of mobile electrode motion). Such addition decreases heating of flat electrodes of vacuum transmitting line and time of the whole gap electrical strength recovery and as result, enable to decrease energy intensity current zero battery. Such way lets use the COS for inductive storages with a high current, under it current zero does not exceed 1/1.2*10-4 sec. An estimate of geometric sizes and energy characteristics of device in the context of conception of pulsed generators based on inductive storage and combination opening switch is done in this paper too.