Transient recovery voltages of circuit breakers in UHV transmission system

Circuit breakers are an important element in a substation, which is used for coupling of busbars, transformers, transmission lines, switching of shunt reactors, capacitor banks etc. The most important task of a circuit breaker is to interrupt fault currents and thereby protect various power system components. This task requires operation of the circuit breaker under different making and breaking conditions such as - faults in the vicinity of the circuit breaker, short-line faults, out-of-phase closing/ opening, switching of - capacitor /shunt reactor banks, no-load transformers/lines etc. During opening operation, after the arc extinction, the insulating medium between the breaker contacts has to withstand the rapidly increasing recovery voltage. This recovery voltage has a transient component (transient recovery voltage, TRV) caused by the system when current is interrupted. The TRV of the Circuit Breaker is a decisive parameter that limits the interrupting capability of the Circuit Breaker. The TRV to be adopted for system voltages of 1200 kV, towards which our country is migrating, needs to be estimated by transient studies as they cannot be extrapolated from lower voltage systems. This paper deals with the modeling and study results of TRV for typical 1200 kV networks and a sample 1200 kV Indian system using Electromagnetic Transient Programs (EMTP).