Enhancement circuit breaker reliability by using fault current limiter

The fault current levels through the breakers have a significant impact on failure probability of circuit breakers. With the expansion of the network, fault current levels increase and circuit breakers are subject to increasing duties and stresses, and are more tending to failures. Deferent method such as circuit breaker replacement proposed. In this paper implementation of Fault Current Limiters (FCL) for solving this problem is proposed. The impact of fault current limiters performance on reliability of circuit breaker is presented. Hence, the absolute, stress-induced failure probability for a given circuit breaker of a power system is computed with and without using FCL. Finally, an economic analysis is performed and an economic feasibility study is conducted. The proposed method is evaluated by numerical studies based on IEEE RTS test system.