Designing a Platform to Evaluate Metal Oxide Varistors for DC Circuit Breaker Applications

Design of a metal oxide varistor (MOV) evaluation platform was introduced and implemented in this work. The key challenges included mimicking critical features of dc power grid, aging the MOV samples at a desired speed under desired conditions, and keeping the platform much more robust than the samples. Also, necessary protection is considered for unpredictable faults in the test system for both software and hardware failures. The goal of building this platform is to understand aging and degradation of MOVs under dc circuit breaker application. The uniqueness of dc circuit breaker MOV waveform and duality between multi-MOV dc circuit breaker and the single MOV evaluation platform is introduced.