Arc Affected Surface Composition Changes in Silver Tin Oxide Contacts

The mandate to replace silver-cadmium oxide (Ag/CdO), which has been a preferred material for many contact applications, presents a need for arc erosion data to allow for informed material design decisions. The high cost of indium necessitates a better understanding of the role of indium oxide in the product. This is a follow up of the comparison between Ag/SnO 2 /In 2 O 3 by IO and PM method, and the work to examine the effect of In 2 O 3 in the PM approach. Reported here are additional work of detailed chemical analysis and x-ray diffraction analysis performed on the arc erosion products to determine the compositional changes.