Validating Equivalence of Compression Cylinder Structures to Enhance Reliability and Efficiency in High-Capacity Circuit Breaker Designs

With the rapid development of the new energy industry, the demand for electrical energy continues to increase. To ensure the safety of the power system, increasingly stringent requirements are being imposed on the design and manufacturing of high-capacity circuit breakers. To reduce design costs, arc simulations are commonly employed for arc extinguishing analysis before type testing. However, due to limitations in computational capabilities, current arc simulation methods typically employ various equivalent and simplified approaches, with the most easily overlooked being the treatment of the compression cylinder. This paper compares three different equivalent structures of compression cylinders for an 80kA product from a certain group, and through no-load simulations, validates the influence of different compression cylinder equivalent structures on the internal airflow field for arc extinguishing. This effectively determines the optimal structure for arc simulation, saving significant computational resources and enhancing model reliability. Subsequently, the paper elaborates on the arc model under T100a burning conditions for the 80kA product, laying the groundwork for further simulation analysis. Finally, based on this model, simulations of the 80kA T100a are conducted, with a thorough analysis of arc burning and airflow field characteristics. This study, through reliability verification with the addition of equivalent structures before arc simulation, provides an important reference for the accuracy of equivalent structures in future large-scale model simulations.