A virtual instrument for measurement of flicker

All types of fluctuations of the r.m.s. voltage in power systems may be assessed by using a flickermeter which complies with the specification given in IEC-EN 60868. In this paper a digital flickermeter is presented based on the implementation in the frequency domain of the weighting filter block of the eye-brain simulation chain. The virtual instrument, implemented with an acquisition board inserted on a PC and with a software developed with the LabView tools, samples the voltage and furnishes the instantaneous flicker level and other severity coefficients. Results of simulated and actual data are reported to validate the performances of the developed flickermeter.