Reduced-Time Finite Element Model for Thomson Coil Actuator

Abstract

With the rapid development of DC systems and the increasing demand for DC circuit breakers, electromagnetic repulsive drive-based Thomson coil actuators (TCAs) are widely investigated to provide high-speed actuating required for ultra-fast mechanical switches, especially used in hybrid DC circuit breakers. The actuating mechanism is required to be fast, reliable, and economic. This also creates the need to perform fast highly accurate modeling, simulation, and optimization to investigate the operating mechanism performance. In this study, the fast-operating mechanism-based Thomson coil repulsive drive actuator modeling is investigated. Two simulation methods, equivalent-circuit method (ECM), and finite element method (FEM) are performed for analyzing the TCA performance. In the ECM simulation, Newton’s equation of motion is solved together with the circuit equations of the coils. On the other hand, the electrical, magnetic, and mechanical coupling is solved by FEM simulation. A sliding mesh technique is introduced to reduce the computational cost. The two developed solutions were then compared with the experiment for model verification. Results showed that the presented mesh technique was able to significantly reduce the simulation time, and results were in good agreement with the experiment compared to ECM.