1. Create Your User Profile and Status Updates

    Arc Flash Forum members are invited to create a user profile. Let others know who you are, what you do and even add a picture or avatar of yourself. What are you up to? Let people in the arc flash and electrical safety community know with "status updates"!
  2. Welcome to the All New Arc Flash Forum

    Arc Flash Forum is a community where we help each other learn about arc flash and electrical safety. There is still much to be learned about arc flash, standards, PPE, studies and more and We need your HELP!

    If you have good information about Arc Flash - Post It! If you have a question about Arc Flash - Post It! If you can provide answers to Arc Flash questions - Post it!

    Sign up as a today member! Feel free to link to this site www.arcflashforum.com. Tell your friends. We want to help everyone be safe in the workplace!
  3. Bigger and Better!

    As you have no doubt noticed, the forum has been through quite an upgraded and looks and feels very nice! There are loads of new features and ways in which this site can now be even more useful to the community in learning about Arc Flash and Electrical Safety.

    Create your detailed user profile
    Add a profile photo of yourself
    Like the forum on Facebook
    "Like" users' posts
    Publish your articles in the library
    ...and much, much more!

    Learn More About the New Features Here

Arc Terminator

Discussion in 'Equipment to Reduce Arc Flash Dangers' started by LarryJo, Jun 30, 2009.

  1. LarryJo New Member

    My client has purchased the Arc Terminator from Square D.
    Using the software, the model shows a category 3 rating for the switchgear that has the terminator. I am not able to model the terminator so the category 3 is based off just the normal operation trip time. Since the incident energy is related to trip time, can I take the incident energy at the trip time without the terminator and ratio it to the 1/4 cycle time with the terminator to determine the incident energy with the terminator?
    If I do this, should the labels have the new category on them even though it would only apply when the terminator is operational? My understanding is that the labels should indicate the category rating when someone is working on the equipment live, but in this case the terminator will still be operational even if the doors are open and someone is working on it. The vendor tells us that with the terminator, the Arc Flash rating is a category 0 but that is how they are selling it and i wanted to get some advice from some of you guys. Not that I do not believe them, it would just make me feel better is someone else out there has addressed this.
  2. brainfiller Administrator

    Deja Vu. :cool:
    This sounds similar to arc resistant switchgear a few years ago. It was designed to contain the arc and be "Category 0" regardless of what the calculations indicated. Most people would accept the category 0. However until recently, 70E never officially acknowledged the arc resistant design.

    Sounds like we're going down that road again with the Arc Terminator design. I would make sure you get something in writing from the manufacturer to back up (CYA) the category 0 rating. I'm not sure I would change the arc flash model though.

    I know there are a few switchgear guys that hang out here as well. Maybe they will have some other good info to add.
  3. LarryJo New Member

    Thanks

    I did get some documentation from the vendor that verifies the category 0 claim. I just need to make the model print me a label that has that category on it.
  4. McFlash New Member

    Not sure what software package you are using, but in easypower you can do it quite easy. There are a couple of ways, one way is to just force the bus to a #0 this will come out to #0 every time you run calculations, the other way is to set a user defined clearing time....I think you can only go down to .01 at a min but that should give you a good idea if you are really a #0 or not. Hope this helps.

Share This Page