Impact of Temperature on Nonlinearity of Voltage Transformers in Harmonics Measurement

Letizia, Palma Sara; CROTTI, GABRIELLA; Delle Femine, Antonio; GALLO, DANIELE; Iodice, Claudio; Landi, Carmine; Luiso, Mario; Signorino, Davide; GIORDANO, Domenico

doi:10.1109/TIM.2025.3548764

Published May 21, 2026 | Version v1

Journal article Open

Impact of Temperature on Nonlinearity of Voltage Transformers in Harmonics Measurement

1. Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica
2. Università degli Studi della Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli"
3. University of Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli"

This work was supported in part by the European Partnership on Metrology (EPM) under Project 22NRM06 ADMIT.

The project 22NRM06 ADMIT has received funding from the European Partnership on Metrology, co-financed by the European Union’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme and from by the Participating States.

Abstract

The aim of the study here presented is to evaluate how temperature variations affect the metrological performance of inductive voltage transformers (VTs) in harmonic measurements. The analysis specifically targets the harmonics up to 1 kHz, where measurements using VTs can be challenging due to their nonlinear behavior. In fact, recent scientific literature has evidenced that when a VT operates under distorted conditions, the harmonics at its secondary side are not simply a scaled version of those injected. Instead, they are a combination of the injected harmonics and the spurious ones generated by the iron core due to its B–H curve. This phenomenon has been investigated in laboratory under controlled conditions, and the specific techniques have been proposed to compensate for it. However, no studies have analyzed the impact of temperature variation on this phenomenon and, consequently, on the introduced errors. This article addresses this open issue through experimental activities on two different VTs using a high-accuracy reference setup. Results show that, for different temperatures, the measured VT harmonic errors can differ up to an order of magnitude, indicating that this influence quantity cannot be neglected.

Files