Synthetic Testing Method for Generator Circuit Breakers

Today, generator circuit breakers are air-blast circuit breakers, mainly to cope with the non zero passage current requirements. Their breaking capacity is extremely high (275 kA/24 kV). The testing station power is not always great enough to perform a complete testing through a direct circuit. The low ohmic value parallel resistor in those breakers makes it difficult to perform the synthetic tests. The authors bring forward a rather simple circuit arrangement to test at one time the breaking capacity of the main chamber. They wish to demonstrate the effectiveness of the testing method with an arc model.