A Study on the Safety of Organic Compound Type Thermal Fuse

유기물가용체형 온도퓨우즈의 안전성에 관한 연구

To protect the damages or the disasters caused by overheating of industrial electric equipments or electric home appliances, a temperature sensitive thermal fuse is generally used in those equipments. Thermal fuses cutoff the current flow when the temperature of the electric equipments are abnormally overheated and over the certain temperature. Therefore thermal fuse is one of the most important elements in the sense of safety. Thermal fuses are classified into two types according to thermally sensitive materials, a low temperature melting alloy and an organic chemical compound. Domestic products of thermal fuses are now only with an organic chemical compound. Domestic products tested by using cutoff test and aging test etc. are satisfied UL specification. It's shown that the accuracy and the precision of the domestic products are as good as those of the overseas products obtained UL mark. However, some of domestic products show the reclosing problem which is mainly related the safety. This problem should be solved to make the reliable thermal fuses. In this paper, our Interest is to find out the causes of reclosing. In the comparison between thermally sensitive materials occurred reclosing and those occurred no reclosing, the test effects show that the characteristics of emitting heat and absorbing heat are different.