Study of Impact Process of Air Arc on the Chamber Shell Based on the Interaction of Fluid–Structure Method

Based on the commercial ANSYS workbench simulation software, the fluid–structure interaction method is used to calculate the air arc pressure distribution in arc chamber, and its impact effect on the shell during interrupting the high current is simulated and analyzed. The stress and deformation distributions of the arc chamber shell with different materials and thicknesses are obtained. It is confirmed that the maximum stress of the shell with 6-mm thickness decreases by ~25% compared with that of 3-mm thickness shell, and the maximum deformation decreases by ~20%. Four models for thickening different local regions are proposed to optimize the shell structure based on the above analysis, including thickened middle regions of the wall inside/outside and corresponding edge regions of the wall. The simulations results indicate that the structure of the arc chamber shell could be optimized very well to achieve the most uniform stress/deformation distribution using the model with thickening the middle region of the outside wall.