Thermal recovery process prediction in a self-blast interrupter with the generation of swirling flow

In a SF₆ self-blast interrupter with the magnetic-field-producing coil, electrical arcs make hot gas flows driven into the expansion chamber for generating the blowing-off force during the high-current phase. When the fault current approaches natural current zero, this force can be used for cooling down and quenching the residual arcs. And the interaction of electrical arc-gas flow is critical to predict the phenomena happened after current zero such as thermal recovery process. In this study, we calculated SF₆ arc plasmas caused by fault current interruption inside a self-blast interrupter using a computational fluid dynamics technique and investigated the thermal recovery process according to the magnetic-field-producing coil with the concept of post-arc current.