A New Active Thyristor-Based DCCB With Reliable Opening Process

Abstract

Replacing expensive IGBT with thyristor to design dc circuit breaker (dcCB) is attracting attention recently due to its advantages in terms of low investment and low conduction loss. However, due to the half-controlled characteristic of thyristor, the existing thyristor-based dcCBs (T-CBs) cannot be actively turned off. As a result, the opening process is not fully controllable and reliable. In this letter, a simple active T-CB (AT-CB) topology is proposed. The proposed AT-CB can interrupt both fault current and operation current actively, and the current breaking process is fast, reliable, and fully controllable. Moreover, the proposed AT-CB can be improved to be bidirectional without increasing the conduction loss, and the topology remains simple. Parameters design principle and operation process of AT-CB are presented. Scaled-down experiment verified the effectiveness of the proposed solution.