Retrofit of vacuum interrupters to GEC BVP 17 and BVP 22 11kV OCBs

[ScottyUK]

Anyone in the UK got any experience with retrofitting vacuum interrupters to GEC type BVP 17 and BVP 22 truck type oil circuit breakers? I'm looking for specific recommendations on companies who have done a good job and have some successful history of doing this specific work as well as any negative experiences with this type of project: I can use Google as well as anyone but that just doesn't give me real-world experience. Obviously I am aware of Areva who inherited the legacy GEC switchgear designs, and there's P+B Engineering offer a couple of alternative designs based on either an ABB or Cutler-hammer vacuum interrupter. Which other companies have done decent quality work for members? I'm guessing someone out there working for the distribution companies will have done a few of these (Marmite?).

Breaking capacity is a significant factor: the board is right at the rated fault level of 500MVA / 26kA which is a) concerning b) above the rating of the VCB options I have found. At present three sources feed a common bus with sectionisers closed, but unless we can find a VCB with a higher breaking capacity we will have to sacrifice some redundancy and go down to two sources, or add fault limiting reactors to drop the fault level a few kA. I am not sure how well these retrofits would behave if we try to recover some of the redundancy by using a fast transfer scheme either - any thoughts on that would be appreciated.


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[Marmite]

Scotty, unfortunately I've no direct experience of this myself. However we have units on the system, along with EDF, ENW and others, provided by Systems Power Engineering

http://www.systems-power.co.uk/products.html

They provide new trucks retrofitted with vacuum bottles. I believe it is a generic mechanism which is then tailored to fit the appropriate fixed portion.

I'm not so sure whether you will be able to get anywhere near that fault level, though. The usual rating for 11kV gear such as BVP17 is 13.1kA 250MVA.

There have been one or two minor issues with the mechanism which can be found by searching on the ENA DINS/SOPs/NEDERs database, but it's not unusual for switchgear to appear on the database at some point in its life.
Regards
Marmite