Senior Capstone Design Paper

Senior Capstone Design Team 54 has been engaged to design a mechanical piece of test equipment to simulate the mechanical forces that a fused cutout will see during an electrical occurrence for MacLean Power Systems (MPS) of York, SC. The overall problem is that the mounting arm for the fused cutout is experiencing plastic deformation from the mechanical forces that are produced during an electrical occurrence. MPS hopes to eliminate the problem by acquiring a testing apparatus that will simulate the mechanical forces produced by the electrical occurrence, giving MPS the ability to test the plastic deformation of newly designed mounting arms.
After extensive background research, it was found that the failure of the mounting arm for the fuse cutout is definitely a problem within MPS. From additional research on the fundamentals of fuses and switches, along with test rig standards and codes, and engineering concepts and methods will be used to develop a test apparatus for MPS. However, there is a competing product on the market that allow the fuse cutout to reclose itself after an electrical occurrence.
The test will be assembled and used at MPS’s York, South Carolina facility. Their engineers will install new cutout designs and observe how they perform when experiencing the forces
The body is the part of the cutout that supports the fuse tube and the insulator. The fuse holder is the tube that contains the fuse link and is the part of the cutout that swings open during a fuse expulsion. The fuse link is the element that will melt and break when the current exceeds the fuse cutouts rating. Fuse cutouts vary based off their maximum recovery voltage, system operating voltage, continuous current, basic-insulation level, and fault-current levels. The fuse cutout that our test system will be designed for is MacLean Power Systems XS Polymer Cutout that is rated at