Changing the design parameters of a circuit breaker to reduce its energy consumption may results in the increases in the design costs of the equipment structure

material and heat dissipation.In this study

the traditional energy consumption model of circuit breaker was analyzed

and a multi-loop structure was adopted to build a new optimal design evaluation model of the circuit breaker considering energy consumption and cost of the circuit breaker.Then

a cultural differential evolutionary（CDE）algorithm was designed for this new optimal design evaluation model in order to optimize the main parameters

such as the number of parallel circuits

the contact area

the contact resistance

and the energy consumption.Subsequently

the relevant parameters of the optimal design evaluation model were calculated and applied to production of HSWX series circuit breaker prototypes.The results showed that the active power consumption and temperature rise of the new circuit breakers with multi-loop structure were significantly reduced

indicating that the proposed optimization method is feasible and the design efficiency of the circuit breaker can be greatly improved.