On the use of metal oxide varistors as a snubber circuit in solid-state breakers

When solid-state switches are used in DC-breaker topologies, the turn-off operation can cause transient over-voltages that might harm the semiconductor itself. The over-voltage is caused by the combination of the very rapid current decrease of a solid-state switch and an undesired stray inductance in the parallel MOV-branch. The authors have proposed a possible solution where a smaller MOV is connected close to the solid-state switch to limit the over-voltage. This way, the over-voltage protection can be separated from the energy absorption task of the MOV. A small scale test set-up has been used to show that the peak voltage across the breaker is fully determined by the inner MOV. It is also shown that the performance can be increased by changing the U-I-characteristics of the outer MOV by adding several components in parallel.