Detection of Flicker Caused by Interharmonics

International standard bodies have specified an instrument capable of detecting and assessing the severity of lighting flicker, which is called a flickermeter. However, a deficiency with regard to flicker caused by high-frequency interharmonics has been reported in the recent literature. In this paper, another deficiency of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) flickermeter with regard to low-frequency interharmonics, whose frequencies are below the difference between the fundamental frequency and the cutoff frequency of a bandpass filter of the IEC standard flickermeter, will be discussed and illustrated based on analysis and numerical experiments. A new approach based on down-up sampling in the discrete-time sample domain is also proposed to address the flicker-detection problem associated with interharmonics. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method by a comparison with the current flickermeter standard in the presence of interharmonics.

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