A Simple Method for the Calibration of Traditional and Electronic Measurement Current and Voltage Transformers

The calibration of measurement transformers represents a classical task in the practice of electrical measurements. Most commercial instruments that are expressly designed for this purpose found their working principle on a scheme that is based on the idea of Kusters and Moore. Although they can assure very high accuracy, the need to employ a high-performance electromagnetic circuit makes them very expensive and usually not suitable for measurements at frequencies that are higher than 50 or 60 Hz. For this reason, these kinds of instruments cannot be employed for the calibration of the new generation of current and voltage transducers, such as electronic measurement transformers, whose employment is growing in all the applications where wide bandwidth is required. In this paper, a new method for the calibration of electromagnetic voltage and current measurement transformers (VTs and CTs) and electronic voltage and current measurement transformers (EVTs and ECTs) is discussed, and a deep metrological characterization is carried out. The novelty of the proposed method is represented by a completely different approach to the measurement of the ratio and phase errors of the measurement transformers. The method is based on the proper digital signal processing of the signals that are collected at the secondaries of the transformer under test and of a reference transformer when the same signal is applied to their primary. Since no auxiliary electromagnetic circuits are required, this solution can be easily implemented in a simple and cost-effective way. In spite of its simplicity, the tests that are developed on a prototype clearly point out that the proposed system is suitable for the calibration of measurement transformers with precision class up to 0.1 in the frequency range from 50 Hz to 1 kHz.