Fabrication and small scale short circuit tests of hybrid fault current limiter employing asymmetric non-inductive coil and fast switch

Hybrid fault current limiters (FCL) have been researched at Yonsei University. The hybrid FCL has advantages such as having a rapid response to a sudden fault situation and a fast recovery time from a quench. It consists of an asymmetric HTS coil, a switching module, and a bypass reactor. The asymmetric HTS coil is wound with two different types of HTS wires in an opposite direction so that it has nearly zero inductance at the superconducting state. When the quench occurs at the fault state, a strong magnetic field is generated from the asymmetric coil because of different quench characteristics of two HTS wires, and then a repulsive force is induced in the switching modulo. The force opens the switch and the fault current is pushed into the bypass reactor. In this research, we analyzed the cause of the repulsive force and confirmed, experimentally and computationally, that the magnitude of a repulsive force is varied by changing the gap distance between the asymmetric coil and the switching module. By using the FEM simulation, we calculated the repulsive force with respect to the gap distance and verified that the effect of the gap distance. Then, short circuit test was carried out to confirm the correct operation of the fast switch.