Supercapacitor Assisted Arc Management Approaches for Direct Current Circuit Breakers-A Comparison with State of the Art and Potential New Directions

Over the past several decades many researchers have attempted developing DC circuit breaker techniques, recognizing that a DC current loop does not have voltage or current zero crossings across the contact terminals, in comparison with an AC circuit where voltage and current waveforms carry two zero crossings per each cycle. All DC circuit breaker design efforts are based on several primary techniques such as (i) mechanical (ii) solid state and (iii) hybrid. However, commercially useful techniques or prototype development has been limited to mechanical only approach with the adoption of 3 phase AC circuit breakers where three separate contacts are placed in series to share arc energy. Solid state and hybrid design approaches require DC power supplies, transistor driver stages and synchronization circuits which makes the prototype development very cumbersome. As a uniquely different approach, authors have started working on supercapacitor assisted techniques for arc energy management and this article presents corresponding preliminary findings with some experimental evidence.