Characterisation at Low Voltage of Two Reference Lightning Impulse Dividers

An effort is pursued by several European National Measurement Institutes to lower the uncertainties in calibration of UHV measuring systems for lighting impulse. To this end, several reference dividers are investigated as regards their accuracy both for amplitude and for time parameters. At SP RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, a 500 kV resistive reference divider has been in use since 2000. Additionally an 800 kV resistive divider is investigated as a possible reference divider for UHV lightning impulse measuring systems. The best uncertainty for the 500 kV reference measuring system is 1 % for voltage amplitude and 3 % for time parameters. The present work aims at lowering these uncertainties by means of better characterisation and evaluation of the possibilities to apply corrections for known errors. The scale factor and dynamic behaviour of a resistive divider can be conveniently determined at low voltage and frequency. Further experiments such as linearity tests and augmented by scientific work is needed to ascertain the performance at high voltage. Step response plays a major role in the characterisation of dividers, and in this work much effort has gone into gathering step responses and evaluating them for various circuit layouts to characterise the variation of the step response due to circuit dimensions and diverse proximity effects. The step applied to the divider is generated by a mercury wetted relay based step generator with an output voltage of 200 V. The step rise-time is a few ns, and thus appreciably faster than the response of the divider. Apart from inspection of the step response itself, evaluation of measurement errors is performed by convolving an ideal curve with the step response of the divider, including its transmission cable. The convolved signal is evaluated with impulse evaluation software and the parameters compared to the ideal input. The difference is a measure of the errors introduced by the divider. This procedure follows IEC 60060-2: 2010.