Optimization design for actuator of vacuum circuit breaker

The actuator of 10kV, 12.5kA vacuum circuit breaker has been chosen as the investigation object in this paper. The breaking and closing velocity characteristic which are formed form the technical datas of the interrupter are taken as the specifications, the lengths of the connecting rods of the actuator are chosen as the optimization variables. The difference between specifications and the velocities calculated at each breaking and closing point, and the materials costs of those rods compose the multiple objection function. The optimization strategy of discretized random direction searching method is adopted for solving the optimization design problem. It is shown by comparing the optimization results with the specifications that the optimization technique presented in this paper can be as the reference for actuator design.