A Capacitive Hybrid DC Circuit Breaker With Current Limiting Capability

The DC circuit breaker serves as a critical component in maintaining the safety and stability of DC power systems. Its performance is pivotal for effective fault isolation during system failures. This paper proposes a novel hybrid DC circuit breaker topology with current limiting capability (CL-HCB), which consists of a low-loss branch and a main breaking branch. During normal operation, the capacitors are capable of self-charging. When the system faults, the fault current is rapidly diverted to the main breaking branch, and the current-limiting inductor is engaged to suppress the fault current's rise rate by utilizing the capacitor's charging or discharging characteristics, thereby interrupting the fault current. Additionally, the topology supports adaptive reclosing. This paper details the structure and working principle of the topology and build a single-terminal equivalent system in MATLAB/Simulink to verify the accuracy of the theoretical analysis and demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed topology.