AC Series Arc Fault Modeling for Power Supply Systems Based on Electric-to-Thermal Energy Conversion

The measured voltage waveform of the arc fault for the 220-V power supply system is continuous but nonsmooth, which is hard to be reproduced with the traditional arc models. Consequently, this article proposes an arc model based on electric-to-thermal energy conversion. Both the heat convection loss and the heat conduction loss are considered in this arc model. This proposed arc model is specially used to simulate the arc circuit interaction during the whole development process of the continuous arc fault for the 220-V power supply system. Due to the fact that this proposed arc model is a multivariable nonlinear differential equation, this article proposes a computation method based on the current region splitting according to the nonsmooth connections of the measured voltage waveform. The model parameters can be adjusted independently in each current region. Then, the comparisons between measurements and the arc model results are given, which show a good agreement in the all current regions. In addition, the effective estimations for the arc geometrical and electrical parameters are achieved based on this proposed arc model. Finally, experimental results validate that the arc model and the corresponding computation method proposed in this article are general and effective for the 220-V power supply system.