An Effective Approach to Reducing Arc Flash Hazards in Power Systems

The arc flash hazard is related to electrical safety in work place and has gained much attention as part of the safety program for many facilities. An effective approach to reducing the arc flash hazard in existing industrial and commercial facilities is proposed in this paper. To illustrate the proposed approach and provide quantified results, computer simulation is conducted for a large oil field facility and a manufacturing facility in a commercial building as two case studies. The simulation results from the two case studies show significant reductions on the incident energy and the fault clearing time, which verifies the effectiveness of the proposed approach.