Transient recovery voltage: A case study applied to industrial systems

This paper aims to study, calculate and analyze the characteristics of the transient recovery voltage that appears across the terminals contacts of a circuit breaker during a fault interruption, particularly in specific fault conditions such as terminal faults and short-line-faults. The case under study consists in the opening, during a terminal fault, of a single circuit breaker in a 13.8 kV industrial system feeding two critical loads: a furnace and a capacitor bank. Simulations were conducted using the ATPDraw 6.0 program, which is a free software. It was possible to observe the importance of these analysis for the correct purchase of circuit breakers in order to provide reliability and safety to electrical systems.