The Performance Evaluation of IEC Flicker Meters in Realistic Conditions

The light flicker effect is one of the most complex phenomena in the power quality field. It involves voltage fluctuation shape, lamp behavior, and eye-brain activity. As a first approach, the cause of light flicker was modeled in terms of voltage amplitude modulations, with a rectangular or sinusoidal shape. This is the main reason these modulated voltage waveforms have been adopted to evaluate the performance of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) light flicker meter. Unfortunately, in realistic conditions, the observed voltage fluctuations have usually more complex shapes; therefore, it might happen that two IEC flicker meters give different measurement results for the same voltage input, depending on the different implementation. In this paper, we are mostly concerned with the synthesis of an automatic test system for the evaluation of the IEC light flicker meter performance and the measurement of the short-time severity index (Pst) with a standard IEC flicker meter when a wide set of complex modulating shapes is applied to the voltage. Part of them has been implemented by adopting the parameters suggested by the international organizations; starting from the obtained results, some new modulating shapes are proposed and tested.