Design and Development of Impulse Current Generator to test Electric Contact Welding

As Ultra-fast disconnect switches are used to increase interconnections between substations for improving the grid reliability and resiliency, they experience very high fault current levels. The electrical contacts of these switches must be capable of withstanding faults up to 30 kA for about 1 ms. This project consists of 3 undergraduate students and a Ph.D. student mentor tasked to design and develop an impulse current generator to test different electric contact materials for their susceptibility to welding under fault current.