Development of Solid-State Circuit Breaker for Current Commutation in Hybrid DC Circuit Breaker

This article proposes a solid-state circuit breaker (SSCB) for current commutation in hybrid dc circuit breaker. The proposed SSCB can achieve dynamic voltage balance through a gate driver which has fast rising time and synchronously drives several solid-state switches (SSs) by applying a multicore transformer. In addition, the transformer size in the gate driver can be reduced by a state-hold mode, which maintains on and off states of switches by applying pulse voltage with short pulse to the transformer. Moreover, the proposed SSCB is designed with a folded structure making the upper and lower current paths in opposite directions to reduce parasitic inductance which causes voltage ringing. Experimental results from the proposed SSCB with conduction test (peak current of 9 kA and base pulse width of 2 ms) and blocking test (9 kA) are presented to verify the proposed works.