External diagnosis of Gas Circuit Breaker contact wearing

The internal inspection for a GCB (gas circuit breaker) is regularly performed to check and change contact parts in the case that the number of times of fault current breaking reaches a specified number, because TBM (time based maintenance) criteria is generally applied. Our new system, however, can change maintenance criteria to CBM (condition based maintenance). Current interval for internal inspection may be, however, redundant compared with the actual amount of contact wearing, because it is difficult to estimate the actual amount of contact wearing correctly from the outside. Then, in order to evaluate the precise amount of contact wearing from the outside, we developed a sophisticated system which can presume the accurate amount of contact wearing by using real breaking current and arcing time. Furthermore, this new system can evaluate the precise amount of contact wearing even if CT (current transformer) is saturated by DC in fault current and regardless of the current phase at the breaking. Therefore, the internal inspection period to replace contact materials can be extended up to nearly three-fold length compared with the traditional way.