Development of PDC and PDU with semiconductor breakers

This paper describes a semiconductor breaker for higher-voltage direct-current (HVDC) power feeding systems. To reduce energy consumption of ICT devices, one effective measure is to manage their power use. To manage the power of individual ICT devices, circuit breakers, which turn ICT device power on and off, must be compact and remote-controllable. Because feeding voltage fluctuations, which occur due to short circuits, can potentially cause a stoppage or failure of ICT equipment, the circuit breaker must be capable of shutting down short circuits without large voltage fluctuations. To control the voltage fluctuations with a compact circuit breaker, we developed a semiconductor breaker with a semiconductor switch. We propose here a circuit configuration of the semiconductor breaker that can control voltage fluctuations. We evaluated the developed semiconductor breaker in an experiment in which we shut down a short circuit using a power distribution cabinet (PDC) and power distribution unit (PDU). The results confirmed that the developed semiconductor breaker was effective in controlling voltage fluctuations.