The aim of this work is to assess whether actual distorted conditions of the network are really affecting the accuracy of inductive current transformers. The study started from the need to evaluate the accuracy performance of inductive current transformers in off-nominal conditions, and to improve the related standards. In fact, standards do not provide a uniform set of distorted waveforms to be applied on inductive or low-power instrument transformers. Moreover, there is no agreement yet, among the experts, about how to evaluate the uncertainty of the instrument transformer when the operating conditions are different from the rated ones. To this purpose, the authors collected currents from the power network and injected them into two off-the-shelf current transformers. Then, their accuracy performances have been evaluated by means of the well-known composite error index and an approximated version of it. The obtained results show that under realistic non-rated conditions of the network, the tested transformers show a very good behavior considering their nonlinear nature, arising the question in the title. A secondary result is that the use of the composite error should be more and more supported by the standards, considering its effectiveness in the accuracy evaluation of instrument transformers for measuring purposes.

Instrument transformers (ITs) play a key role in electrical power systems, facilitating the accurate monitoring and measurement of electrical quantities. They are essential for measurement, protection, and metering in transmission and distribution grids and accurately reducing the grid voltage and current for low-voltage input instrumentation. With the increase in renewable energy sources, electronic converters, and electric vehicles connected to power grids, ITs now face challenging distorted conditions that differ from the nominal ones. The study presented in this paper is a collaborative work between national metrology institutes and universities that analyzes IT performance in measuring distorted voltages and currents in medium-voltage grids under realistic conditions. Both current and voltage measuring transformers are examined, considering influence quantities like the temperature, mechanical vibration, burden, adjacent phases, and proximity effects. The study provides detailed insights into measurement setups and procedures, and it quantifies potential errors arising from IT behavior in measuring distorted signals in the presence of the various considered influence quantities and their combinations. The main findings reveal that the temperature has the most evident impact on the inductive voltage transformer performance, as well as the burden, causing significant changes in ratio error and phase displacement at the lower temperatures. As for low-power ITs, establishing a priori the effects of adjacent phases and proximity on the frequency responses of low-power ITs is a complex matter, because of their different characteristics and construction solutions.

The response of the human eye to flicker depends on the type of lamp used. Standard flickermeters measure the voltage across the lamp and assumes a 60-W incandescent lamp as a light source. When a different lamp is the light flicker source, standard flickermeters give erroneous results. This paper presents a dynamic model of the eye-brain response to flicker. The model is based on the analysis of the light emitted by the lamp. A suitable measurement system has been developed, and three different kinds of lamps have been considered. Experimental results show how the emitted light spectra and the human eye response to different colors combined to determine the level of annoyance. The uncertainty affecting such results, which arises from the hardware of the developed system, has been also estimated.

As a reliable power network is crucial to deliver promised electric power, cable powerline monitoring in medium-voltage networks has a great importance for distribution system operators all over the world. A considerable rate of failures in cable powerlines is referred to the cable joints. Especially during the summer period, an excessive number of joints are subjected to explosion, causing outages in different points of the power network. To this purpose, in this paper, using a simple test setup presented in a previous work, the effects of temperature on the cable joint tan delta measurement have been evaluated. In fact, the temperature is one of the possible causes of faults and, from the patterns presented in the results, the hypothesis seems to be confirmed.