The Urbanek Black Box Arc Model in Passive Resonance Circuit Breakers for HVDC Applications

The black box model by Josef Urbanek of electric-arc, in air-blast circuit breakers or in circuit breakers characterized by an electro-negative gas (e.g. SF6) as quenching medium, is adopted to simulate DC current interruption in HVDC applications. In particular, it is used to model the electric arc phenomenon in passive resonance circuit breakers. Owing to its formulation, the Urbanek model (UM) allows both to easily verify design rules proposed in the literature and to provide more accurate ones. Numerical bifurcation analysis and basin of attraction calculation are used to this aim.