SUBMITTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL BY

Investigation into the dynamic characteristics and decaying behaviour of SF6 arcs during the current-zero period is of great significance to improving the interruption performance of high voltage circuit breakers and ensuring their reliable operation. The present research was conducted by means of modeling and experiment to provide a better knowledge of the switching process to help the design and optimization of high voltage SF6 circuit breakers. The first part of the work concerns the determination of thermophysical properties of SF6 plasmas under local thermodynamic equilibrium state (LTE). A systematic comparison with transport coefficients obtained using an old data set and experimental test has been performed to check the reliability of the proposed phenomenological approach in evaluating transport cross sections. Properties especially transport coefficients become sensitive to the choice of Debye length definition predominantly due to the different collision integrals affected by the different screening distance. Pressures increase can also influence thermophysical properties due to the inhibited chemical reactions. Moreover, the thermophysical properties under non-equilibrium conditions have bee