Abstract
The importance of. identifying the causes of electrical faults cannot be overstated because of the accidents caused by over-current that take place at the home, the office and electrical facilities due to misuse, poor products and system faults. It is necessary to gather objective, scientific data pertaining to electrical fault investigation in a product liability(PL) environment. To date, no database(DB) has been built concerning the accurate cause analysis of faultyfacilities. In this paper, accident hazard and arc scattering when over-current flows in copper wire was investigated. It was found that when over-current flows in a copper wire, the copper wire became heated and bent and beads were scattered around the wire with a flash. It was determinedthat the fusing current and time was related to the current rise per second. For example, when the current rise per second was largethe fusing current was higher than when the current rise per second was small, and the beads dispersed along a wide area. Fusing time, however, was shorter. The possibility of electrical fault became highest when the fusing current was higher. As the current rise per second is short, the dendrite structure is distributed in the surface of the copper wire. These experimental results can be utilized for a fault process DB system in the investigation and the prevention of electrical faults.
