SOLID STATE DC CIRCUIT BREAKER BASED ON THE GATE TURN OFF THYRISTOR (GTO).

Design procedures for a DC circuit breaker based on the gate turn-off thyristor are presented. Because DC circuits contain some inductance, a recovery voltage appears during interruption due to inductor trapped energy. This voltage must be controlled in order to protect the GTO and other system components. In the circuit breaker designs presented here, the trapped energy is dissipated in a resistor bank or absorbed by a commutation capacitor. It is shown that circuit-breaker performance can be improved by adding switched resistors to the breaker design. Optimization techniques are used to determine the resistor sizes and switching times that reduce interruption time. A switched RC topology is introduced in which a series capacitor is included with the switched resistor bank to reduce the interruption time to near ideal. The design, analysis, and experimental evaluation of a switched resistor and switched RC circuit breakers are presented.

SOLID STATE DC CIRCUIT BREAKER BASED ON THE GATE TURN OFF THYRISTOR (GTO). Conference Paper