What Is Circuit Breaker, Arc Formation, Arc Extinction, Methods

Hello guys, welcome back to our blog. In this article, we will discuss what is a circuit breaker, arc formation, arc extinction, methods of arc extinction, the working principle of a circuit breaker, arc formation in a circuit breaker, arc extinction in a circuit breaker, and methods of arc extinction.

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What Is A Circuit Breaker

The circuit breaker plays a very important role in protection. Nowadays the circuit breaker is used everywhere for protection. Circuit Breaker is like a helmet that we ware while riding a bike.

The circuit breaker is a part of the equipment which can

Break or make the circuit either by remote control or manually under normal conditions.
Break the circuit or network automatically under fault conditions like overload and short circuits.
Make a circuit either by remote control or manually under fault conditions.

Working Of Circuit Breaker

The circuit breaker consists of moving and fixed contacts, called electrodes. Under normal conditions, these contacts remain closed and the contacts will not open until the fault occurs or someone does it manually. If a sudden fault occurs in the line or circuit, the tripping coil in the circuit breaker will get energized and the moving contact is pulled back by some mechanism, thus the contacts are opened and the circuit is protected.

When the contacts are opened the circuit breaker arc is struck between them. The current will continue to flow. The formation of the arc will also produce heat which may damage the circuit breaker. The main problem here is that arc should be extinguished within the shortest time otherwise heat produced will damage the circuit breaker.

How Arc Is Produced In A Circuit Breaker

When a short circuit occurs, the heavy current starts flowing through the circuit breaker before the circuit breaker trips or breaks the circuit. At the instant, the contacts of the circuit breaker begin to separate, the contact area decreases rapidly and due to heavy current the temperature between the contacts increases which is sufficient to ionize the air, and the difference between the two contacts is very small. The ionized air acts as the conductor and provides a low resistance path thus, a current is still flowing through the circuit as long as the arc is present.

Principles Of Arc Extinction

The factors responsible to maintain the arc between the contacts are:

The potential difference between contacts.
The ionized particles between contacts.

01. If we somehow increase the distance between the two contacts i.e., moving and fixed contacts, then the arc formation will be vanished because of the high potential difference.

02. The ionized air is the main thing that maintains the arc, by some technics we can vanish the ionized air by the air-blast method.

Methods Of Arc Extinction

There are two methods of arc extinguishing, they are:

High resistance method
Low resistance method

01. In the high resistance method, some technics are used to increase the resistance of the arc so that the current should not flow. The methods used to increase the resistance are lengthening the arc (the resistance of the arc is directly proportional to the length), cooling the arc (by cooling the arc, we can deionize the air), splitting the arc( this method is used in MCB where the arc is split), etc.

02. The low resistance method is employed for the AC circuit only. In this method, arc resistance is kept low until the current is zero where the arc extinguishes naturally. The methods used are cooling, blast effect, etc.

Guys this was the short information on what is a circuit breaker, how the arc is formed in a circuit breaker, arc extinguishing methods, etc. If you have any doubts comment below. I hope this article may help you all a lot. Thank you for reading.

Tags: What Is Circuit Breaker, Arc Formation In Circuit Breaker, Arc Extinction In Circuit Breaker, Methods Of Arc Extinction In Circuit Breaker.

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