Nadew Belda of DNV GL’s KEMA Laboratories won the award during the 5th International Conference on Electric Power Equipment – Switching Technology (ICEPE-ST), held in Kitakyushu, Japan, 13-16 October 2019.
ARHNEM, The Netherlands, 23 October 2019 – Nadew Belda, innovation engineer at KEMA Laboratories, has won the Wang Jimei Best Young Investigator’s Award with his presentation “High-Frequency Current Interruption of Vacuum Interrupters in an Experimental DC Circuit Breaker”, and was assessed on relevance, technical level and presentation, both orally and through a poster by a scientific international committee. Competition was fierce, since switching in DC was by far the most preferential subject of this year’s 170 submitted papers on switching technology. The award is named after professor Wang Jimei (1922-2014). He was professor at Xi’an Jiaotong University in China and is considered the father of China’s switchgear development.
PROMOTioN
The work was carried out in the framework of the “PROMOTioN” project and the paper is co-authored by René Smeets, Roy Nijman, Michalis Poikilidis and Cees Plet. The project ‘PROgress on Meshed HVDC Offshore Transmission Networks’ (PROMOTioN) applied in 2015 for funding under the EU Horizon 2020 programme call. Its specific objective is to pursue an agreement between network operators and major equipment suppliers regarding a technical architecture and a set of multi-vendor interoperable technologies in order to accelerate HVDC grid development. Read more about the PROMOTioN project here.
Paper
High-voltage DC circuit breakers (HVDC CBs) are expected to play an important role in the protection of multi-terminal and meshed voltage source converters in HVDC grids. Several concepts of HVDC CBs have been proposed and some are prototype tested at KEMA laboratories. This paper focuses on the performance of vacuum interrupters for HVDC CB application. The performances of three different vacuum interrupters, designed for AC application, have been subject to about 200 tests under different test conditions. The test results serve to identify the critical stages of current interruption process that need to be demonstrated during typical current interruption tests of HVDC CBs, and will serve as input for standardization.
ICEPE-ST
The objective of ICEPE-ST is to encourage the innovation in the field of science, technology and application of electric power equipment, especially for switching technology. The Conference is a biennial event and is the largest in switching technology worldwide. ICEPE-ST brings all experts together working on switching phenomena, behaviour and the development, characterization and application of switchgear. Topics are emerging HV switching technologies, apparatus for power flow control in smart distribution grids, fault current limiting technology, semi-conductor switching technology (including HVDC), switching phenomena in ultra-high voltage systems, digital design technologies and fundamental physics.
Learn more at www.dnvgl.com/kemalaboratories