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US 8,681,463 B2Granted
Circuit breaker panel
AssigneeEdison Global Circuits, LLC
InventorsJeffrey L. Franks, Stephen E. Williams, Ray Cole
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
In at least some embodiments, a system includes a plurality of circuit breakers and trip control logic external to and coupled to the circuit breakers. The trip control logic enables a plurality of different tripping options to be selected for each of the circuit breakers.
Claims18
A system comprising:
- a plurality of circuit breakers, each circuit breaker comprising circuitry for detecting faults on a corresponding electrical circuit and in response generate a fault signal identifying a detected fault as an overload, an arc fault circuit interrupt (AFCI), or ground fault circuit interrupt (GFCI);
- and
- trip control logic external to and coupled to the circuit breakers for receiving a fault signal from a selected circuit breakers and in response selectively enabling tripping of the selected circuit breaker in accordance with a tripping option preselected for the selected circuit breaker from among default overload, AFCI, GFCI and AFCI/GFCI tripping options.
A circuit breaker panel, the circuit breaker panel comprising:
- fault detection logic within each of a plurality of circuit breakers associated with the circuit breaker panel for generating a fault detection signal identifying a fault detected on a corresponding electrical circuit as an overload, an arc fault circuit interrupt (AFCI) or ground fault circuit interrupt (GFCI);
- and
- trip control logic coupled to each fault detection logic and located exterior to the plurality of circuit breakers, wherein the trip control logic enables tripping of a corresponding circuit breaker in response to a received fault detection signal in accordance with one of a plurality of different tripping options selected for the corresponding circuit breaker, the plurality of different tripping options including default overload, AFCI, GFCI and AFCI/GFCI tripping options.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.