NAME : Ren SMEETS COUNTRY : the Netherlands REGISTRATION NUMBER : 14127

GROUP REF. : A3 PREF. SUBJECT : 2 QUESTION N : 2-19

Back-to-back capacitor bank switching is the energization of a capacitor bank while adjacent banks in the station are already energized, see the figure. Back-to-back capacitor bank switching is usually associated with a large inrush current that flows during the pre-arcing phase in the closing operation of a circuit breaker. The very high transient current may damage contacts and/or other parts such as the nozzle of SF6 breakers. In the figure, a complete back-to-back switching test sequence is shown. For vacuum circuit breakers, in which the switching and the insulation function is shared by the same set of contacts, damage to contacts may imply a reduced dielectric withstand in the open position. This seems to be confirmed by test statistics, as outlined in paper A3-201. In this paper results are presented of 433 capacitor bank switching test series in the voltage range 12 550 kV during the past 11 years. It has been found that with increasing rated voltage, the probability of late breakdown after capacitive current interruption increases rapidly. In more than 80% of the test series, very short lasting late breakdown events (NSDD) were observed in the voltage class 30 40.5 kV after back-to-back capacitor bank switching. For the application of vacuum switchgear at high-voltage, as studied in CIGRE WG A3.27, this might imply that mitigation of inrush current is essential, once high-voltage vacuum switchgear is applied for back-to-back capacitor switching. By the way, also for high-voltage SF6 breakers passing the back-to-back capacitive test is a major challenge. The standardized IEC value of 20 kApeak is often been criticized as being too high, and especially, in high-voltage applications, inrush current limiting reactors are routinely applied in capacitor banks, as the work of CIGRE A3.26 shows. For single capacitor switching, inrush current is rather limited and vacuum switchgear, up to 84 kV is successfully certified and applied, exploiting the advantage of a long electrical lifetime. Physically, damage to the vacuum breaker's contact surface can be measured by looking at the field emission current that is directly drawn out of the metal by applying very high voltage across the vacuum gap. The field intensification due to the metallic microstructure at the damaged site leads to several tens to hundreds of micro-amperes that we can measure now during standard IEC tests. The observed field emission current at limited values of inrush current was in all cases very low, as can be seen in the graph. Nevertheless, low field emission activity does not directly imply low risk of breakdown.

pre-strike
40 20 0 -20 -40 100 50 0 -50 -100 196

contact touch
1

current interruption load current

re-strike
40 20 0 -20 -40 100 50 0

0.5 0

re-strike current

inrush current

-0.5 -1 100 50 0

recovery voltage
-50 -100 100 -50

198

200

202

150

200

250

300

350

400

450

500

550

600

-100 650

572

574

576

578

100 percentage of test-series with NSDD(s) 80 60 40 20 0 1215.5kV 17.529kV rated voltage 3040.5kV

singlebank backtoback

20 10 0 -10 -20 20 10 0 -10 -20 0 0

inrush current 3.3 kApk

800 600 400 200 0 FE current 90 uA

100

200

300

400

500

inrush current 21 kApk

800 600 400 200 0 0 100 200 300 400 500 FE current 760 uA