Preliminary experiments on saturated DC reactor type fault current limiter

Abstract

Preliminary experiments have been performed on our proposed saturated DC reactor type superconducting fault current limiter (SFCL). The proposed SFCL is similar to a DC reactor type but an additional control winding is used. The DC bias current in the control winding saturates the core. The B-H curve of a magnetic circuit shows that low inductance value can be achieved in saturated region and high value in unsaturated region. The inductance of the saturated reactor depends on type of magnetic material, core size, number of turns and biasing conditions. The advantage of this type of SFCL over the existing DC reactor type is that, it shows low inductance value at normal operation and high value during fault time. On the other hand, the present DC reactor type SFCL shows a fixed value of inductance both in normal and fault time. In our experiment, we observed the inductance behavior of the saturated reactor by changing the control current. In order to make the work simple and convenient we have chosen a ferrite core. The experimental results are presented in this paper.