Performance Analysis of Passive Resonance Circuit Breakers in HVDC Systems

High voltage direct current (HVDC) systems have been increasingly employed to provide a connection amongst various energy sources, especially renewable energies. In order to switch the load current in these systems, the passive resonance breaker (PRB) is employed as a transfer switch. The interruption capability of the PRBs is highly dependent on the dynamic behavior of the arc in this system. Accordingly, this article presents a black-box high-degree of freedom arc-model based on Schwarz and the genetic algorithm as a heuristic optimization to follow the characteristics of the static and quasi-static arc regarding the oscillation frequency of the interruption current. The model has been verified by the published experiments. Subsequently, the PRB operation has been quantified based on the state-space approach along with an accurate dynamic arc model to follow in a wide frequency range of the arc current. The results are indicated that the amplification coefficient alone is insufficient to determine the interruption capability of these protection tools. Therefore, this article attempts to quantitatively determine the interruption capability curve by introducing criteria, such as Delta t PZ (peak to zero time-interval), diarc/dtCZ- and duarc/dtCZ+ to obtain the origins of the interruption failure probabilities and dimensioning of the PRBs with respect to the interruption limits for gas blast CBs.