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Electric power systems in industrial plants and commercial and institutional buildings are designed to serve loads in a safe and reliable manner. One of the major considerations in the design of a power system is adequate control of short circuits or faults as they are commonly called. Uncontrolled short-circuits can cause service outage with accompanying production downtime and associated inconvenience, interruption of essential facilities or vital services, extensive equipment damage, personnel injury or fatality, and possible fire damage.

Short-circuits are caused by faults in the insulation of a circuit, and in many cases an arc ensues at the point of the fault. Such an arc may be destructive and may constitute a fire hazard. Prolonged duration of arcs, in addition to the heat released, may result in transient overvoltages that may endanger the insulation of equipment in other parts of the system. Clearly, the fault must be quickly removed from the power system, and this is the job of the circuit protective devices-the circuit breakers and fusible switches.

A short-circuit current generates heat that is proportional to the square of the current magnitude, I²R. The large amount of heat generated by a short-circuit current may damage the insulation of rotating machinery and apparatus that is connected into the faulted system, including cables, transformers, switches, and circuit breakers. The most immediate danger involved in the heat generated by short-circuit currents is permanent destruction of insulation. This may be followed by actual fusion of the conducting circuit, with resultant additional arcing faults.

The heat that is generated by high short-circuit currents tends not only to impair insulating materials to the point of permanent destruction, but also exerts harmful effects upon the contact members in interrupting devices.

The small area common between two contact members that are in engagement depends mainly upon the hardness of the contact material and upon the amount of pressure by which they are kept in engagement. Owing to the concentration of the flow of current at the points of contact engagement, the temperatures of these points reached at the times of peak current are very high. As a result of these high spot temperatures, the material of which the contact members are made may soften. If, however, the contact material is caused to melt by excessive I²R losses, there is an imminent danger of welding the contacts together rendering it impossible to separate the contact members when the switch or circuit breaker is called upon to open the circuit. Since it requires very little time to establish thermal equilibrium at the small points of contact engagement, the temperature at these points depends more upon the peak current than upon the rms current. If the peak current is sufficient to cause the contact material to melt, resolidification may occur immediately upon decrease of the current from its peak value.

Other important effects of short-circuit currents are the strong electromagnetic forces of attraction and repulsion to which the conductors are subjected when short-circuit currents are present. These forces are proportional to the square of the current and may subject any rotating machinery, transmission, and switching equipment to severe mechanical stresses and strains. The strong electromagnetic forces that high short-circuit currents exert upon equipment can cause deformation in rotational machines, transformer windings, and equipment bus bars, which may fail at a future time. Deformation in breakers and switches will cause alignment and interruption difficulties.

Modern interconnected systems involve the operation in parallel of large numbers of synchronous machines, and the stability of such an interconnected system may be greatly impaired if a short-circuit in any part of the system is allowed to prevail. The stability of a system requires short fault clearing times and can be more limiting than the longer time considerations imposed by thermal or mechanical effects on the equipment.