Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
I. INTRODUCTION
HE HUMAN eye is very sensitive to light flicker but irritation depends on lighting conditions and the individual.
Flicker monitoring should therefore be based on continuous
voltage measurements indicating experienced flicker consistently and objectively.
The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) has
published design specifications for a flickermeter [1], [2]
which evolved from a proposal by the Union Internationale
dElectrothermie [3].
The IEC flickermeter can be divided into two main parts. The
first part realizes an electrical model of the lamp-eye-brain chain
relating voltage amplitude fluctuations to flicker sensation given
as the instantaneous flicker level (IFL) [1]. The flickermeter thus
quantifies flicker on the basis of human irritation. The second
part consists of an on-line statistical evaluation of the IFL [2].
The evaluation produces a representative value of short-term
in 10 minute intervals which reduces the
flicker severity
amount of data considerably and simplifies comparison to limit
values.
This paper resulted from experience gained in designing a
DSP based flickermeter. Space does not permit the presentation
of the full details and therefore we focus on the implementation
of the statistical evaluation method which unlike the IFL measurement (for example [4][6]) has not received much attention.
calculation by classification of the IFL is well defined
The
in the IEC document [2]. To reduce classifier sizes but maintain
accuracy interpolation techniques have been proposed.
A review of the existing methods, however, revealed inconsistent performance. A new evaluation algorithm, which works
reliably and more efficiently is described in this paper.
Manuscript received December 8, 1996; revised April 25, 1997. This work
was financially supported by Trans Power NZ.
The authors are with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand (e-mail:
T.Keppler@elec.canterbury.ac.nz).
Publisher Item Identifier S 0885-8977(00)10298-5.
(1)
(3)
in the case of loads that produce a
Implausible results for
constant disturbance and follow an on/off duty cycle, led to an
,
extension of the definition in (3). The gauge point levels
, and
are determined from subsidiary gauge points by
Fig. 1.
1111
Fig. 3.
Fig. 2. Cumulative Probability Function (CPF) of the signal in Fig. 1 for the
observation time T .
averaging which yields the smoothed values in (4). The calcuis unchanged except that the respective smoothed
lation of
values are used in (3).
th signal level
minimum instantaneous flicker level
maximum instantaneous flicker level
number of points of the CPF.
do not coincide with
Usually the gauge point probabilities
calculated by (1), but lie between known
the probabilities
therefore
values (see Fig. 3). The desired gauge point levels
have to be chosen representatively of the corresponding class.
of the
Choosing the harmonic average
produces symmetric
respective neighboring points for the
relative errors and yields the lowest maximum error for a given
number of classes.
The maximum relative quantization error for class is
(6)
(4)
For completeness long-term flicker severity shall be mentioned. This index is simply calculated from 12 successive
values and is not of interest here.
(7)
III. EXISTING EVALUATION METHODS
A. Classification Method
To reduce computation, only a limited number of points of
classes, which
the CPF can be calculated. This introduces
can be linearly or logarithmically spaced. Fig. 1 shows a time
domain signal being classified into 7 equally spaced classes.
indicates, the duration the signal exceeds
Each
the lower limit of the corresponding class . The CPF, resulting
for the observation time , is shown in Fig. 2.
Quantization errors occur when the gauge points on the
discretized CPF are determined. Increasing will increase the
accuracy of the method and the computation time. In order to
1112
Fig. 4.
Fig. 5.
Bisectional search for
approximations for P . P
P
achieved accuracy.
0 j (k
1 1 1 P represent successive
1 1 1 3) is a measure of the
= 1
(10)
(12)
IV. NEW ITERATIVE EVALUATION METHOD
C. Discussion of Errors
As a basis for the discussion the tolerable errors in determining each of the gauge point levels shall be derived. The error
in flicker severity equals the sum of the partial derivatives
, each weighted by the small deviation
. Using (2)
of
we obtain
(13)
The inconsistent improvements of accuracy by the interpolation technique motivated the development of a new method
based on a search algorithm.
requires the 15 gauge points levels
The calculation of
. The reviewed classification methods however involve the computation of a generally much larger number of
points. After the gauge points have been identified, the remaining curve points are discarded which makes the method inefficient.
A bisectional search algorithm was found to be more efficient
in locating the gauge points. Fig. 5 represents the principle of
Fig. 6.
1113
the method.
is the desired gauge point flicker level that possesses a cumulative probability of %. The initial search interval
and . As a first iteration step the cumulative
is limited by
of the interval is
probability at the center
determined. Because it is less than and due to the negative gradient of the CPF, the subsequent search can be restricted to the
and . The next curve point is calculated
section limited by
and the result determines
at the level
which subsection has to be considered next and so forth.
The iteration terminates once the error meets the desired accuracy. The relative error is determined by the width of the
current section. Because the cumulative probability decreases
monotonically with increasing signal level, convergence always
occurs.
The number of iterations needed depends on the shape of the
CPF curve, the size of the initial section, and the desired accuracy. In order to minimize the total number of iterations, the
widths of the initial sections are minimized, using points from
a list of previously determined CPF curve points. The pseudo
code of the algorithm is listed in Fig. 6.
V. RESULTS
A. Comparison of Errors
Figs. 7 and 8 represent two different types of IFL waveforms,
their CPFs, and the errors in determining the gauge point levels.
The IFL in Figs. 7(a) and 8(a) were produced by a flickermeter
subjected to rectangular flicker and a sequence of sinusoidal
flicker respectively. The CPF gauge points were found by the
described techniques. The true CPF used to estimate the errors, was established by the iterative algorithm configured to
produce an error below 10 %.
The logarithmic classification and the iterative algorithm
were set up to give an error of less than 10% and thus
Fig. 7. Evaluation of rectangular flicker. (a) Time domain IFL and resulting
CPF. (b) Error for each gauge point level.
the results of the error estimation in Figs. 7(b) and 8(b) are
consistent.
Linear interpolation reduces the errors of the logarithmic
classification (for a constant number of classes) in case of
Fig. 7(b). However in Fig. 8(b) errors are increased and even
exceed the 10% limit value. This example shows that the linear
interpolation does not improve the accuracy consistently for
various CPF curve shapes. Even more complex interpolation
techniques (cubic or spline interpolation) are not suitable to
approximate the CPF due to its stochastic nature.
B. Compliance Testing
The IEC standard [2] provides reference signals to test a flickermeter and its statistical evaluation for compliance.
1114
Fig. 9.
REFERENCES
[1] IEC Publication 868, FlickermeterFunctional and design specifications,, Tech. Rep., IEC, 1986.
[2] IEC Publication 868, FlickermeterEvaluation of flicker severity,,
Tech. Rep., IEC, pt. 0, 1991.
[3] UIE, WG Disturbances, Flicker measurement and evaluation, Union
Internationale dElectrothermie, Tech. Rep., 2nd revised ed., 1991.
[4] W. Mombauer, Flicker simulation and minimization, in IEE Conference Publication of the 10th International Conference on Electricity
Distribution (CIRED), 1989, pp. 102106.
[5] K. Srinivasan, Digital measurement of voltage flicker, IEEE Trans.
Power Delivery, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 15931598, Oct. 1991.
[6] L. Toivonen and J. Mrsky, Digital multirate algorithms for measurement of voltage, current, power and flicker, in IEEE PES Trans. and
Dist. Conference Proceedings, 1994, pp. 330340.
1115
Thomas Keppler received his Diplom Ingenieur Elektrotechnik from Universitt Stuttgart, Germany, in 1994. Since 1995 he has been working on a Ph.D.
at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.
Neville Watson received his B.E. (Hons) and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, where he is now a
Lecturer. His interests include steady-state and dynamic analysis of ac/dc power
systems.
Jos Arrillaga received a B.E. degree in Spain and the M.Sc., Ph.D., and D.Sc.
in Manchester, where he led the power systems group of UMIST between
19701974. He has been a Professor at the University of Canterbury since
1975. He is a Fellow of the IEE, of the IEEE, and of the Royal Society of New
Zealand.