Development of Fast Acting Electronic Circuit Breaker

Abstract

The rapid increase in population has more demand and consumption of electrical energy in the market, use of equipments such as electrical and electronic components are also costlier. In order to protect the system from overload, or short circuit here is one possibility, which is by fast acting electronic circuit breaker. A circuit breaker is an automatically operating switch designed to shut down the power supply when it is overloaded. The tripping depends on the current passing through the CT’s which is connected in series with load. The project is designed to develop the power supply which shuts down when it is overloaded by using a fast acting electronic circuit breaker. The concept of developing a electronic circuit breaker came into focus realizing that the conventional circuit breakers such as MCB’s and fuse take longer time to trip. Therefore for sensitive loads it is very important to activate the tripping mechanism within short period of time. We know that the Modern technologies are paramount to provide operational reliability and financial profitability, so it is very important to develop an electronic circuit breaker by using a micro controller arduino. Here an electronic circuit breaker is designed using arduino in which program is dumped and a particular is set so that the system can shut down when it is overloaded. Here the voltage is sensed and rectified to DC and then it is compared with a preset voltage by a level comparator to generate an output that drives a relay to trip the load. The relay is preferred in place of semiconductors because such solid state switches would invariably fail in case of accidental short circuits. This project is designed to overcome the drawback of thermal type of circuit breaker like MCB based on a thermal bimetal lever trip mechanism which is very slow. This project is based on the current sensing across a series element typically a CT (Current Transformer). The current sensed which is compared against the preset value proportional to the voltage by comparator which is inbuilt in arduino to generate an output that drives a relay to trip the load very fast.