A Permanent Magnetic Actuator for 126 kV Vacuum Circuit Breakers

Permanent magnetic actuators (PMAs) have been widely used in medium-voltage vacuum circuit breakers (VCBs) due to their high reliability and controllability. However, a conventional bistable PMA cannot be adopted in power equipment for the transmission voltage level such as 126 kV VCBs directly because of its low-velocity characteristics. The objective of this paper is to propose a multimagnetic circuit PMA to satisfy the high-velocity requirements for 126 kV VCBs. The novel PMA is a bistable and axisymmetric structure, including holding and driving components whose magnetic circuits are separated. Air gaps are specifically designed in the magnetic circuits to improve the velocity performance of the novel PMA. Both static and dynamic characteristics of the novel PMA model have been calculated through finite-element software coupled with multi-body dynamics software. Furthermore, a prototype of the PMA has been developed according to the calculation results. The experimental results on the prototype have shown that the velocity characteristics of the PMA are able to meet the requirements of a 126 kV VCB and agree well with the simulation results.