A preliminary description of a new arc representation has been introduced in . In which, the Modified Mayr (P-/spl tau/ model) arc equations are solved in the transient analysis control system (TACS) field of the electromagnetic transient program (EMTP) and represented in the power network by TACS controlled voltage source. In this paper, substantial improvements of this representation are carried out. A performance comparison with the EMTP built-in Avdonin model is incorporated to validate the proposed representation effectiveness. SF6 breakers with experimentally defined arc parameters are used to perform this comparison. The thermal limiting curve is computed by the proposed and the built-in models and compared with the measured characteristic. Also, universality of representation is verified via carrying out different arc model examples of circuit breaker and transmission-line arcing faults. The study results validated the proposed representation regarding accuracy and universality.