Improvement of voltage withstanding level of vacuum interrupters

The voltage withstand level of high voltage vacuum interrupters can be improved in two ways: one is optimization of the inner electric field of vacuum interrupters; another is high voltage conditioning in the process of production. The present work describes research into both of these methods. For the field optimization, the authors used a finite element method to simulate the inner field and to make the field design as uniform as possible. For the other method, the authors discussed the conditioning procedure and showed that a thorough conditioning can improve the voltage withstand of vacuum interrupters to a large extent. Based on the results obtained from, vacuum interrupters with higher voltage ratings can be produced