Novel Resonant DC Breaker with Capacitor Self-Charging by Controllable Injection Energy and Internal Overvoltage Suppression

With the rapid development of DC grids, resonant DC circuit breakers (RDCBs) have become critical for fault isolation. However, existing RDCBs often suffer from severe energy mismatches, and components, including mechanical switches, resonant capacitors, and power electronic devices, suffer from excessive internal overvoltage during the current interruption process. To address these issues, a novel RDCB with a capacitor self-charging current excitation source (CES) is proposed in this paper. First, by controlling the charging process of CES by the fault current, the injected energy is matched with the commutation requirements, significantly reducing the transient recovery voltage (TRV) applied to the mechanical switch. Second, to suppress the voltage applied to the resonant capacitor, a metal oxide arrestor (MOA) should be connected directly in parallel with the resonant capacitor, avoiding overvoltage caused by the internal oscillation between the resonant inductance and the resonant capacitor. Furthermore, an anti-parallel magnetic core is designed for CES, ensuring dynamic current sharing among parallel IGBTs while maintaining a zero-inductance characteristic externally. Simulation results verify that the proposed RDCB reduces the peak TRV by at least 64% compared with existing RDCBs. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the proposed overvoltage suppression methods is validated, significantly improving the interrupting reliability.