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A new fire protection circuit breaker from Siemens reliably interrupts arcing faults in circuits, thus reducing the risk of cable fires.
Siemens has extended its range of fire protection circuit breakers with a variant for currents of up to 40 amperes (A). This unit uses special analysis software to recognize arcing faults in an electrical installation and immediately interrupts the circuit in order to prevent a cable fire. Around a third of all fires in Germany are caused by defects of this or a similar kind in electrical installations.
Fire protection circuit breakers offer additional safety because they also detect types of electrical arcing faults that do not blow conventional fuses. This explains why their specifications were recently incorporated into Germany’s DIN VDE 0100-420:202016-02 national standard and are now compulsory for many types of facility. Examples include public buildings, bedrooms and lounges in senior homes and daycare centers, as well as woodworking operations, wooden houses, and paper and textile plants. In the USA, arcing fault circuit interrupters have been required by law since 2008.
Recognizing all Kinds of Arcing Faults
Siemens is a pioneer in this area, and introduced Europe’s first fire protection circuit breaker in 2012. Such circuit breakers have, to date, been designed for currents of up to 16 A. This is the normal current in private households in Germany, for example. Should, however, units with higher electrical power requirements be operated – motors or large ovens, for example – then stronger currents will flow. What’s more, in some countries such as Belgium and the United Kingdom, currents of over 16 A can flow in circuits. For these use cases, Siemens has now come up with a fire protection circuit breaker for rated currents of up to 40 A. The new breaker is easy to retrofit in existing installations and is suitable for industrial operations and other facilities that have power-hungry devices in their circuits.
The advantage of fire protection circuit breakers is their ability to recognize all kinds of arcing faults. Arcs arise due to flashovers at crushed or kinked cables or as a result of damaged insulation. If interrupted, such locations overheat to the extent that the cable starts to burn.
Sophisticated Signal Processing
Today, fuses protect against arcing faults that arise between two adjacent lines. Such faults cause a short circuit or a ground fault and the residual-current-operated circuit breaker trips or the fuse blows. Arcing within a cable – for example, where a conductor breaks – however, doesn’t change the current flowing. So the fuse doesn’t blow and the arc remains active.
Fire protection circuit breakers cover these gaps in safety because they also register such serial arcing faults. The challenge is to distinguish genuine faults from unimportant arcs, such as sometimes occur in an electric drill, for example. Special evaluation software registers current, voltage, and other measurement values in a circuit such as high-frequency components in the current waveform. Arc faults can be identified by specific characteristics in these measurements. In this event, the fire protection circuit breaker interrupts the circuit and eliminates the danger of fire within milliseconds.
Contact:
Mr. Dr Norbert Aschenbrenner
Editorial Office
Siemens AG
norbert.aschenbrenner@siemens.com
Original Internet Article:
https://www.siemens.com/innovation/en/home/pictures-of-the-future/infrastructure...
A new fire protection circuit breaker from Siemens reduces the risk of cable fires.
Criteria of this press release:
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Electrical engineering
transregional, national
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