Development of a Flickermeter to Measure Non-Incandescent Lamps Flicker

The flickermeter described in International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) Standard 61000-4-15 is widely used to quantify the voltage flicker level in practical applications. The IEC flickermeter generally performs well for incandescent lamps. However, it fails to measure the flicker of non-incandescent lamps caused by some ranges of interharmonics. This paper suggests modifying the existing IEC flickermeter by adding a new block to it in order to enable accurate measurement of the flicker caused by high-frequency interharmonics. A digital implementation of the proposed modified flickermeter is tested, showing encouraging results. The error of the modified flickermeter is very low compared to the original one, even for the worst conditions. The changes implemented in the flickermeter do not affect its regular performance measuring incandescent lamp flicker due to amplitude modulation, making it a more generic flickermeter version. An arc furnace simulated by PSCAD/EMTDC is used to check the performance of this flickermeter.