Software calculates electrical risks

An Arcad product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Jul 14, 2008

The incident energy, flash protection boundary and level of personnel protective equipment are determined based on equipment configuration, arc duration and working distance.

The Arc-Flash-Analytic V 2.0 software tool provides an easy to use instrument for calculating arc incident energy, flash protection boundary and risk category required by NEC and OSHA when work is to be performed on or near the energised equipment.

It is based on IEEE1584 Guide for Performing Arc-Flash Hazard Calculations.

The IEEE1584 empirically derived model can accurately account for a variety of setup parameters, including: open and box equipment configurations, grounding of all types and ungrounded, gaps between conductors of 3 to 152mm, bolted fault currents in the range of 700A to 106kA, and system voltages in the range of 208V to 15kV.

Reference data listing most typical configurations and detailed procedure for IEEE1584 based arc flash calculations has been included in the calculator.

The calculator takes equipment configuration, the gap between electrodes, the grounding type, the short circuit fault current value and the system voltage on input and determines arcing fault current at the potential point of fault.

Next, the incident energy, flash protection boundary and level of personnel protective equipment are determined based on equipment configuration, arc duration and working distance.

For protective devices operating in the steep portion of their time-current curves, a small change in current causes a big change in operating time.

Incident energy is linear with time, so arc current variation may have a big effect on incident energy.

The IEEE1584 solution is to make two arc current and energy calculations: one using the calculated expected arc current and one using a reduced arc current that is 15% lower.

The IEEE1584 procedure requires that an operating time be determined for both the expected arc current and the reduced arc current.

Incident energy is calculated for both sets of arc currents and operating times and the larger incident energy is taken as the model result.

This solution was developed by comparing the results of arc current calculations using the best available arc current equation with actual measured arc current in the test database.

The calculator predicts arcing fault current for a given configuration and bolted fault short circuit current.

It also predicts the bolted fault current required to cause a 15% reduction of the predicted arcing current for the given configuration.

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