Multi-domain simulation and analysis of electromagnetically actuated reclosers

This paper deals with the analysis and simulation of an electromagnetic actuator for medium voltage reclosers. At first the actuator structure and its theoretical analytical model is shortly presented; a detailed finite element (FE) model is then reported and described. A mid-level simulation model based on co-energy approach is finally presented, allowing estimating the effect of different control strategies as well as different design parameters. Several simulation results provided by the models are reported and commented referring to different case studies. The results obtained by a purposely developed prototype are finally compared with the simulation results in order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.