Simulation Of Low Voltage Apparatus Switching Arc

Usually there will be switching arc between the contacts of low voltage swtiching apparatus when it switch circuit with loads. The switching arc is harmful to the contacts, insulation, reliability of electrical gear because of its very high temprature feature. For arcing time is very short in swtichinggrear, it is very difficult ot observe arc phenomena directly for researcher. Therefor, visulization of switching arc is important to understand arc phenomena, to analyze the features of arc and to improve the design and reliability of switching grear.Based on analyze the visualization methods that had been proposed by other researchers, a new swiching arc visual approach was introduced in this paper. Arc image acquistion, image processing, edge detection and weak feature enhancement techniques was studied. A swiching arc image acquisiton and visual simulaiton software based on high speed CCD camera hard ware system was designed and implemented. Swiching arc image was captured continuously. Enhancement arc image with good vision effect was obtained.A dynamic visual simulation model based on arc image was introduced. Switching arc can be thought as a column because of its self-magnetic field pinch effect. Arc column is deformed by magnetic force that produced by circuit current flow. If the arc image was acquired from a orthongonal direction to arc column deformation force. The arc column center coordinate and radius can be extracted from the arc image. Then visual model of switching arc can establised by using arc image feature points and non-uniform rational B-spline suiface fitting. A switching arc visual simulation software was implemented by using OpenGL graphics library and Visual C++ object-oriented programing language. Experiment result shows that the switching process can be simulated vividly on computer display by using proposed switching arc visual simulation model, the arc motion can be observed from different viewpoint.