Co-simulation Method for Full System Analysis of Circuit Breakers

Developing high voltage circuit breakers efficiently requires a number of simulations. These include mechanics, arc physics, thermodynamics, and flow of the extinguishing medium. According to our experience, it is not always possible to perform a simulation of a whole system in a single software platform and therefore one has to deal with partial solutions. The goal of our research is to enable co-simulation between different solvers/platforms. This paper illustrates the approach applied to the simulation of HV circuit breakers in the commercial tool Dymola [4] coupled with multi-body dynamics (MBD) or finite element (FE) solvers running in parallel. FE or MBD solvers are used for solving the equations of motion, whereas Dymola is used for the calculation of thermodynamics and flow. Co-simulation is implemented based on our own developed library in C language.