A smart add-on device for the remote calibration of electrical energy meters

The introduction of the European Directive on Measuring Instruments (MID), on 2004, has revolutionized the issue of the calibration and the traceability of the electrical energy meters. The MID imposes to calibrate the active energy meters accounting for real electromagnetic environments with peculiar disturbances. In many countries of the European Union, this factor has opened important economic and technical problems that need to be accomplished for. The paper proposes a suitable smart "add on" device able to realize an automatic calibration procedure that may solve the problem of the traceability in easy and economic way. In the paper the measurement architecture of the proposed “add on” device is described in detail together with a deep experimental characterization that highlights the goodness of the proposal.