Three-phase short circuit testing of high-voltage circuit breakers using synthetic circuits

High-voltage circuit-breakers have reached such high short-circuit breaking capabilities that they must be tested in synthetic circuits with separate current and voltage sources. As the main performance to be verified by type tests is the interruption of three-phase faults, it is desirable whenever possible to perform three-phase tests. Three-phase synthetic testing is rather new and not covered by ANSI/IEEE and IEC standards. The purpose of this paper is to present a procedure for three-phase synthetic testing which can properly test the circuit-breaker at a reasonable cost, i.e., a number of tests using a limited number of circuit-breaker specimen for the entire series of type tests.