Experimental Investigation on the Hot Switching Capability and Associated Failure Mechanism of Electrical Connectors

The hot switching ability of connectors is urgently required for electrical engineering applications. In this paper, a novel test rig for simulation of mechanical insertion and withdrawal operation with electric duty is designed. The waveforms of tangential force, contact current, contact voltage and switching power of typical blade and turning-fork contact pairs during the hot switching process are measured simultaneously. In the electrical endurance experiments, the variations in arc energy and tangential force of blade and receptacle pairs as a function of operation cycles are presented and interpreted explicitly. Finally, the roles of sliding wear and arcing erosion in the degradation process of electrical connector are discussed.