Studying and improvement of operation of IEC flickermeter

Flicker phenomenon, as a power quality component, can be measured by the standard IEC flickermeter that has been widely accepted as an international standard for flicker severity measurement. In industry applications, the standard IEC flickermeter suffers from some deficiencies. Among them, it is unable to measure flickers caused by interharmonics whose frequencies are higher than 85Hz. It also is unable to measure the effect of the various lamp flickers. In addition, it is unable to determine direction of flicker source with respect to a monitoring point. In this paper, these deficiencies are improved respectively by designing an improved filter, using the border graph of gain factor of various lamps and by using flicker power to determine direction of a flicker source. At the end, the proposed flickermeter is evaluated in a simulated system, that its flicker source is a welding system.