Understanding Switching Arcs and Dielectric Capability of a SF6 Self-Blast Interrupter

The design and development procedures of SF6 gas circuit breakers are still largely based on trial and error through testing although the development costs go higher every year. The computation cannot cover the testing satisfactorily because all the real processes arc not taken into account. But the knowledge of the arc behavior and the prediction of thermal plasmas inside SF6 interrupters by numerical simulations are more useful than those by experiments due to the difficulties to obtain physical quantities experimentally and the reduction of computational costs in recent years. In this paper, in order to get further information into the interruption process of a SF6 self-blast interrupter, which is based on the combination of thermal expansion and arc rotation, gas flow simulations with a CFD-arc modeling are performed during the whole switching process such as high-current period, pre-current zero period, and current-zero period. Through the complete work, the temperature of residual arcs as well as the breakdown index after current zero should be a good criterion to predict the dielectric capability of interrupters.