An industrially important class of passively smart materials is electrically nonlinear polymer composites. The transition of conducting composites from low to high resistivity can be utilized for current limitation. Due to Joule losses the material is heated by a fault or short-circuit current. With increasing temperature the polymer matrix expands and the current paths over the conducting filler particles are interrupted. Within milliseconds, the material responds to the fault current by an increase in resistivity up to eight orders of magnitude. Due to the strong nonlinear resistivity - temperature relation, a narrow hot-zone is formed even for long samples. The length of the hot-zone limits the maximum switching voltage. By adding a second filler material of varistor-type, however, the maximum voltage can be considerably increased. When a hot spot is formed in one of the current paths over the conducting particles, a small voltage increase allows already a commutation of the current to neighboring varistor particles. Consequently, the current can still flow to a certain degree and allows to heat also the rest of the material around its path. This leads finally to a very broad hot area, which can resist much higher voltages. By the development of a smart material with two strong non-linearities, a dramatic improvement has been achieved for the application of thermistor composites in current limitation.
展开▼
