ELECTRICAL SAFETY Miniature Circuit Breaker ‘hidden hero’ marks 100 years of safety in enabling energy transition

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ABB is celebrating the 100-year anniversary of the first-of-its-kind Miniature Circuit Breaker (MCB) in 2024, a significant milestone in protecting electrical circuits and evolving to meet the sustainability needs of the future. In the last century, the MCB facilitated electrical safety across sectors, from rail infrastructure to factories, commercial buildings, and data centers.

MCBs detect electrical faults like short circuits and overcurrents, disconnecting the circuit within 10 milliseconds, 10 times faster than the blink of an eye. The circuit breaker can be reset quickly and easily without the need for replacement. As we transition towards a net-zero future, it is essential to increase electrification and integrate more diversified, renewable energy sources. This means protection devices have even greater electrical loads to manage along with variations in power supply and demand. ABB’s MCBs provide electrical safety to everything from solar panels and heat pumps to electric vehicles and brings additional protection against faults like residual currents, surges, ground fault currents, or arc faults.

Aldo Sciacca, Head of Energy Distribution, ABB Electrification’s Smart Buildings Division, says, “Our future-focused portfolio centers on achieving energy efficiency and transparent, sustainable practices. We also focus on easy installation, which is invaluable when facing skilled labor shortages. Through our compact, modular, and flexible designs, we’re enabling applications to be retrofitted and to integrate renewable energy sources, quickly and safely. This plays a vital role in ensuring the safe development of sustainable, modern communities, cities, and urban landscapes of our future.”

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Today’s protection devices make applications around the world safer, smarter, and more sustainable. Compact designs enable retrofitting even in legacy equipment where space is limited.

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History of the MCB

In 1918, ABB’s forerunner, Brown, Boveri & Cie (BBC), purchased Stotz Kontakt, an electrical supplies company based in Mannheim, Germany. The company’s founder, Hugo Stotz stayed on with BBC and, working with his chief engineer, Heinrich Schachtner, invented the first resettable Miniature Circuit Breaker, a device that was patented in November 1924.

By combining thermal and magnetic trips into a single, reusable unit, the MCB was patented in 1924, becoming capable of switching off high currents and becoming resettable, meaning devices didn’t have to be repeatedly replaced. Today, ABB has eight factories globally manufacturing MCBs with more than 100 million poles per year.

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