ArcMaster - Calculation example

Consider 256V AC panelboard with a 25mm gap between conductors, 19,048 Amp 5 X/R bolted fault short circuit current at its terminals. The gear is protected by Mersen 1400A 600V AC rated fuse part number A4BQ1400 located upstream. Incident energy at working distance, arc flash boundary and site-specific level of personal protection equipment (PPE) will be determined using ARCMASTER V1.0 software program based on AC arc flash modeling and NPFA 70E Standard for Electrical Safety in the Workplace. Start with specifying equipment class, single- or three-phase fault type, gap between conductors, working distance, available short circuit fault current (ASCC) and the fault X/R ratio, part of ASCC through protection device and system voltage:

The program will automatically take care of determining arcing current and arc duration at the predicted arcing current through protection device based on the selected protection device time-current characteristic. See How to calculate incident energy and arc flash boundary of a single and 3-phase arc flash for the detailed AC single- and three-phase arc flash modeling information.

Click on Calculate button. The calculation results screen will appear. Click on Save Results button to save the calculations results. Select label size, language, header type, text color and click on Save as Image and/or Save as PDF button to save the label in one of the available electronic formats. You can also click on Printing menu button to fine tune printing options, preview and print warning labels.

By pressing Save Results button, the results will be saved to a text file for future reference or printing. You can save results for different jobs under different names. By choosing Open from File menu, you can open an existing results file, inspect its current content etc. If you need more complex editing, import the file into your favorite text manipulation processor (MS Word as an example) and do what you need to do.

You can fine tune units of measurement for input and output data by clicking on Units from Settings menu. The ARCMASTER V1.0 software program also allows you to adjust arc duration cutoff, incident energy at arc flash boundary values, save equipment configuration, and more. Please check the program Help for more information.