Current Service Times Prediction of Low‐Voltage DC Circuit Breakers Based on Morphological Features of Arc Plate

During the current breaking period of low‐voltage DC circuit breakers, their contacts and arc extinction system are eroded by arc combustion. The morphology of the arc plate significantly changes after arc erosion. On this basis, a service times prediction model of low‐voltage DC circuit breaker is proposed. First, by observing the morphological changes of the arc plates, it is found that a bright metal fusion trace appears on their surface. With increasing occurrence of arc erosion, significant material loss appears at the top of the arc plates. Then, the grayscale transformation enhancement and region growth algorithms are proposed to preprocess and segment the morphological image of the arc plate to obtain the metal fusion trace. An image mask processing method is proposed to extract the contour of the arc plate to obtain the material loss area. Finally, the two morphological features of the arc plate are used as degradation indicators for low‐voltage DC circuit breakers, establishing a service times prediction model based on Gaussian process regression. Through experimental verification, the relative errors between the predicted and true values of the current service times are verified to be less than 20%. © 2025 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC.