Abstract:
Although the massive use of electricity in industry began at the end of the 19th century, the first
electric arc thermal effects estimating method was only proposed in the 1980s. In the following
decades, several works contributed to increase the knowledge about the phenomenon and to
improve the methods to quantify it. The IEEE Std 1584 first edition was published in 2002,
being the first incident energy calculation dedicated technical standard. This standard, which
has become the industry most popular method, had its second edition published at the end of
2018, with significant changes. A new mathematical model was proposed, including parameters
that were not measured before, in addition to long equations, which manual calculation may be
considered impractical. In this context, this work presents an IEEE Std 1584-2018 method
incident energy calculation script development and its application in two case studies. The first
case study illustrates the parameter evaluation to carry out a low voltage controlgear incident
energy study, ending with a comparison between the 2018 Edition results with those of the 2002
Edition. The second case study proposes a roadmap for carrying out an incident energy dynamic
study that considers multiple sources and the rotating machines short-circuit contribution ac
decrement, concluding with a comparison between the results considering the ac decrement
with the results in which it is neglected, and a discussion of the situations in which the effort to
carry out a dynamic study can be justified.