Series Arc Fault Breaker in Low Voltage Using Microcontroller Based on Fast Fourier Transform

Abstract

Series Arc Fault is one of the disturbances of arcing jump is caused by gas ionization between two ends of damaged conductors or broken wire forming a gap in the insulator. Series arc fault is the primary driver of electrical fire. However, lack of knowledge of the disturbance of series arc fault causes the problem of electrical fire not be mitigated. Magnitude current is not capable to detect of series arc fault. Therefore, this paper proposes fast fourier transform (FFT) to detect series AC arc fault in low voltage using microcontroller ARM STM32F7NGH in real time. A cheap and high speed of microcontroller ARM STM32F7NGH can be used for FFT computation to transform signal in time domain to frequency domain. Moreover, in this paper, protection of series AC arc fault is proposed in the real time mode. In this experimental process, some various experiments are tested to evaluate the reliability of FFT and protection with various load starts from 1 A, 2 A, 3 A, 4 A in resistive load. The result of this experiment shows that series AC arc fault protection with STM32F7 microcontroller and FFT algorithm can be utilized to ensure series AC arc fault properly.