Modelling and simulation of radiative energy transfer in high-voltage circuit breakers

In high-voltage circuit breakers (HVCBs) a high current phase description is essential to accurately estimate the pressure increase in the heating volume. In this paper a HVCB model is proposed including turbulence and radiation models. The main focus was set on two major aspects: the radiation models used generally in computational fluid dynamics studies and the calculation time. For the radiation, due to the limitation of the P1 model and to the consuming calculation time of the DO model, an original hybrid approach (the P1 approximation mixed with a discrete ordinate method) is presented. The results of the different models are presented and discussed. Using the hybrid model, the pressure increase is compared with experimental results validating the model. The calculation times of the different methods are compared.