A new method and instrument for touch and step voltage measurements

Author

MelioPoulos, A. P Sakis ; Patel, Shashi ; Cokkinides, G.J.

Author_Institution

Sch. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Georgia Inst. of Technol., Atlanta, GA, USA

Volume

9

Issue

4

fYear

1994

fDate

10/1/1994 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

1850

Lastpage

1860

Abstract

This paper describes a new method and instrument for measuring touch and step voltages near a grounding system, for example in and around a substation. The hardware, software, and testing procedures are an extension of the smart ground multimeter, developed under EPRI sponsorship. The instrument injects a transient electric current between the ground under testing and an auxiliary ground, and it measures ground potential differences (GPDs) at up to six locations. The GPD measurements are processed with software which rejects external noise using correlation methods. Subsequently, statistical estimation methods are used to extract the touch or step voltages from the thousands of measurement points normalized with the system short circuit capability. Knowledge of the short circuit capability of the substation allows the quick measurement of the touch and step voltages

Keywords

automatic test equipment; computerised instrumentation; earthing; multimeters; power engineering computing; power system measurement; statistical analysis; voltage measurement; EPRI sponsorship; auxiliary ground; correlation methods; external noise rejection; ground potential differences measurement; grounding system; hardware; instrument; smart ground multimeter; software; statistical estimation methods; step voltage measurements; substation; testing procedures; touch voltage measurements; transient electric current; Circuits; Current measurement; Electric variables measurement; Grounding; Hardware; Instruments; Noise measurement; Software testing; Substations; Voltage measurement;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Power Delivery, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0885-8977

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/61.329518

Filename

329518