Black Box Modeling of Low-Voltage Circuit Breakers

In this paper, we propose a black box model for low-voltage arcs. This model is based on the classical theory with the addition of a corrective term to better fit the small current phase, which is seen to be crucial in determining arc extinction. The model is physically consistent, accounting for nonequilibrium effects in a cold plasma. A mathematical algorithm is proposed for model parameter identification, solving a constrained optimization problem by suitably coupling gradient moves with heuristic search methods. Black box modeling is applied to industrial circuit breakers and very good agreement between model predictions and experiments is observed.