Electric field optimization in SF6 circuit breaker

The objective of this thesis is to enhance the insulation capability (Increasing the breakdown voltage) in SF6 CBs by reducing the electric field concentration inside the insulation medium. To achieve that, the electric field Problem in the SF6 CB is formulated as an optimization problem. Two artificial intelligence techniques namely: particle swarm (PS) and simulated annealing (SA) where used to solve the objective function. A combined ANSYS-Artificial intelligence algorithms have been proposed.;The effectiveness of the newly proposed electric field optimization algorithms has been tested successfully on two SF6 CB's (252 kV and 550 kV) reported in the literature. The performance of the proposed methods outperformed the optimization results reported before.;Not only the electric field is highly reduced using the proposed algorithms but also the computational time is reduced too. Furthermore the effect of space charge on the performance of the proposed algorithms has been studied.