engrick wrote:
I agree with Paul with one exception. While propagation has not been seen in electrical equipment between sections it has happened. Where I disagree is in stating 'if the structure is similar...' we can assume no propagation. I am an electrical engineer, not a structural engineer and I am personally not willing to make that assessment.
I would label any single compartment with the worst case. I would most likely label adjacent compartments the same way - worst case. Either would be based on the high side fuse.
Then you have to label it all that way unless it's physically in different gear (ie, separated by cables). What has happened so far in "barier" type testing is that it usually stops at the barrier and the plasma pools there, but sometimes the arc reignites again on the other side of the barrier if I recall correctly from the Mersen tests. Structure really has very little to do with this. It's a plasma/magnetic/electrical thing. And to my best recollection I recall heavy use of aspirin when I had electromagnetics classes and I recall that at the end of the day, it was pretty much impossible to predict with much certainty exactly what happens in that world...general trends yes but basically the electromagnetic engineers do a lot of lab testing to determine how something will perform in the real world...just too many variables to predict what happens. That was 20 years ago though and the emag software I've seen in the last 10 years is truly amazing in what it can successfully do.