Hey Everyone,

Looking at the possibility of commercializing a military Arc Fault protection system, looking for any technical input on if this would be something worth doing. The system uses not only an optical sensor, it uses a thermal ionziation sensor and can use a pressure sensor.

Thoughts?

Thanks

http://www.drs.com/products/control/ADACS.aspx

A couple things jump out at me immediately:

1. The JHU original concept was that it is a portable arc flash sensor/trip unit. At this point there are multiple vendors including Vamp, SEL, ABB, and others. The general concept that they are selling consists of one or more of the following components: point optical sensors, unclad fiber optical sensors, a Rogowski CT used to detect high di/dt, an arc terminator device (multiple variants), and/or breakers with shunt trip inputs. The innovative thing here is the pyroysis sensor for early warning of burning insulation. The rest will be joining an already large market.
2. The original JHU concept is something of a "plug in" portable device that can be rigged up on panelboards and was specifically intended for 480 V panelboards common on naval vessels. However to be able to trip it needs a shunt trip breaker and these are not the standard, so retrofitting becomes necessary.
3. All of these devices intend on providing a separate function for tripping purposes. The best use of the JHU iidea was portability but requires upgraded main breakers without adding arc flash sensors. Arc flash sensors have dropped down to around $3K-$4K in general per installation now so based on the price sheets on the web site, it is not cost competitive. Given that this is also often not far off the mark for a shunt trip main breaker, having portable installations seems like we're not saving very much money and it could simply be built in.
4. In my experience I end up finding other ways of accomplishing the same objective as an arc flash relay, things that I needed to do anyways. The only time it seems to make sense is if I have grossly oversized transformers/breakers, especially at "low" voltage (480/600) where trying to set my trip settings low enough is futile and I need another way to detect arcing conditions other than looking at current alone. This is an exception, not a general rule, so the market is a niche one.