Preliminary research on triggered vacuum switch based fault current limiter

A new type of fault current limiter (FCL) which based on a triggered vacuum switch (TVS) is proposed in this paper. The TVS based FCL (TFCL) is mainly composed of capacitor, a current-limiting reactor connected with the capacitor in series and a TVS connected with the capacitor in parallel. With the TVS at off or on state, the whole TFCL behaves as conventional series compensation or fault current limitation, respectively. Compared with other types of FCL, such as superconducting FCL, thyristor/GTO based FCL, TFCL is with distinguished characteristics, such as high capacity, loss-free, and low price. The digital simulation and prototype experiment based on LC resonant test circuit show that it is feasible to develop TFCL.