High Voltage Circuit Breaker Contact Material―Experimental Study on the Wear Resistance of GrCuW Alloy

Copper tungsten alloy (CuW) is the most widely used electrical contact material for high voltage circuit breakers, CuW alloy has good wear resistance is a necessary prerequisite to meet its performance. In this paper, GrCuW contact materials with different W contents (70, 75, 80, 85wt<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">%</sup>) were taken as the research object, and friction and wear tests were carried out to study the effects of W content on the wear resistance and wear resistance of GrCuW materials, and the relationship between the wear resistance of materials and the ablative resistance of contacts was studied through arc ablation experiments. The results show that with the increase of W content, the wear mechanism changes from adhesive wear to abrasive wear, the wear amount decreases and the wear resistance increases. According to the results of the macroscopic ablative morphology and contact resistance of the contacts, the contact resistance of the GrCuW80 arc contact is at least 669 μΩ, the contact surface of the static and static arc contacts is flat, and the wear degree is light, indicating that the improvement of the wear resistance of the contact material is helpful to improve its ablative resistance.