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 the voltage fluctuation shape, the lamp behavior and the 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 IEC light flicker meter. Unfortunately, in realistic conditions the observed voltage fluctuations have usually more complex shapes, so 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 are applied to the voltage