On Treatment of Some Physical Properties of Gas in Simulation of High-Voltage SF₆ Circuit Breakers

Simulation of unsteady flow of SF₆ gas in a simplified high-voltage circuit breaker model describing the nozzle, contacts and their nearest surrounding is presented. SF₆ is considered as viscous, compressible, real gas described by Redlich-Kwong model. Heat transfer is taken into account due to the gas compressibility. The heat source, triggered by the electric arc between the contacts, was out of the scope of the current research, thus it was not included in the simulations presented. Turbulence, caused by the gas viscosity, is described using realizable k-ε model. In the simulation model, one of the contact sides – electrodes, is considered as moving at prescribed velocity. The part of the space ‘swept’ by the moving electrode is considered as the gas with imposed artificially increased viscosity in order to imitate the rigid body behaviour. Thus, no moving parts of the computational mesh are used in the model. The conservation equations of mass, momentum and energy, given in integral form, are solved using a finite-volume method on unstructured computational grids.