Influence of Network and Arc Parameters on the R500 Interruption Limit of High-Voltage Circuit Breakers

A systematic investigation of how different circuit and arc parameters affect the threshold value for the R500 interruption limit (R500th) has been provided. These parameters include the breaker cooling power, arc time constant, time delay of the transient recovery voltage (TRV), parallel capacitance, and network impedance. The results are obtained through black-box model calculations based on Mayr’s arc model. Our findings suggest that the interruption limit for the R500 method has negligible dependency on the cooling power used in Mayr’s arc model. On the other hand, it is shown that larger values of parallel capacitance and TRV time delay led to a decrease of the R500th. On the contrary, R500th rises by increasing the network impedance. These results imply that the influence of arc–circuit interaction must be considered when applying this approach for assessing the interruption limit. As a validation step, the numerical findings have been cross validated by selected measurement results provided in the literature.