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

• Proceedings of the KSR Conference
• /
• 2008.06a
• /
• pp.327-331
• /
• 2008

This paper dealt with high speed breaking method to parallel arcing in low-voltage systems. The proposed high speed breaking circuit consists of a Rogowski coil and an integrator, and operates with an earth leakage circuit breaker (ELCB). A parallel arcing state was simulated by a short circuit using stripped wires. In this test, we analyzed tripping characteristics of the circuit breaker by the length of wires from 5m to 30m. From the experimental results, we confirmed that the proposed method can break the parallel arcing within a few millisecond.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
• /
• v.57 no.3
• /
• pp.494-500
• /
• 2008

This paper presents the analyzed result of the series arc fault current by using the discrete wavelet transform. The series arcing is caused by a loose connection in series with the load circuit. The series arc current is limited to a moderate value by the resistance of the device connected to the circuit, such as an appliance or a lighting system. The amount of energy in the sparks from the series arcing is less than in the case of parallel arcing but only a few amps are enough to be a fire hazard. Therefore, it is hard to detect the distinctive difference between a normal current and a intermittent arc current. This paper, presents the variation of the ratio of peak values and RMS values of the series arc fault current, and proposes the novel series arc fault detecting method by using the discrete wavelet transform. Loads such as a CFL lamp, a vacuum cleaner, a personal computer, and a television, which has the very similar normal current with the arc current, were selected to confirm the novel method.

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