Comparative Study on the Performance of Arc Fault Detection Devices Under Household Load Conditions

Loose contact, insulation aging, damage and other reasons of electrical circuitry in power supply and distribution system or equipment will lead to the occurrence of arc fault, and arc fault is one of the main causes of electrical fire accidents. Arc fault detection device (AFDD) is a new type of protection device, which can detect the series arc fault in the line. When the series arc fault occurs, the fault current is usually lower than the threshold of the traditional protection device, and it is difficult to achieve timely protection. The research and development of AFDD has reduced the occurrence of fire accidents to a certain extent. The performance of AFDD on the market is uneven, and the detection accuracy of AFDD produced by different companies for different types of loads is different. In this paper, the performances of four AFDDs produced by different companies at home and abroad are compared, and four typical household load combinations are selected to carry out experiments. The experimental results show that AFDD4 without control function has the highest detection accuracy under all load conditions, with an average accuracy of 99.4% and the shortest response time. Among the three AFDDs with control functions, AFDD1 has the best overall performance and the highest average accuracy, reaching 87.2%.