• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2007.11a
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• pp.478-479
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• 2007

Many electrical fires are occurred by leakage currents and sparks generated by a short circuit. Earth leakage circuit breakers (ELCBs) should be tripped at the moment of the faults mentioned above. In this paper, we described the tripping characteristics of ELCBs against parallel arcing faults. A diesel engine generator with the capacity of 375 kVA source was adopted to provide enough large current when a parallel arcing occurred. The experimental results showed that most ELCBs we experimented were not tripped against short-duration pulse currents produced by parallel arcing because the ELCBs are designed to be tripped by a large current with long duration similar to power frequency.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Illuminating and Electrical Installation Engineers
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• v.22 no.12
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• pp.95-100
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• 2008

Conventional Earth Leakage Circuit Breakers (ELCBs) have defects of a breaking failure or a long breaking-time against parallel arc current. In this paper, breaking characteristics of conventional ELCBs were analyzed by simulation of parallel arc in a low-voltage indoor wiring system, and an air-core current sensor and a signal converter being most available for parallel arc detection were developed and applied to a conventional ELCB. The proposed tripped the ELCB regardless of the location of parallel arc. The breaking-time was in ranges of $1.74{\sim}8.3[ms]$ depending on the phase of arc generation, which is about 5 times as fast as conventional ELCBs with the breaking-time of 50[ms].