Porous filter optimization to improve the safety of the medium voltage electrical installations during an internal arc fault

摘要

Electrical power distribution equipment, such asmedium-voltage (MV) switchgear, must be designed to withstandthe pressures and temperatures of gases resulting from an internalarcing fault. An original way to limit the external effects of thearc consists in channeling downward the gas flow across a filtercomposed of a granular porous medium in order to absorb theabrupt pressure wave and to cool the hot gas flow. In this paper,we propose an optimization of the MV switchgear configuration toenhance the porous filter efficiency where we manage to stronglyreduce the external manifestations of the arc fault. On one hand,we employ the numerical simulation tool lying on a physical modelwhere the major events are taken into account. On the other hand,real experimental tests have been performed according to theIEC standards and pressure and temperature histories obtainedby numerical simulation are compared with the experimentalmeasurements.