Simplified Approach to Evaluate the Combined Uncertainty in Measurement Instruments for Power Systems

This paper presents the study of the propagation of the effects of uncertainties in a typical measurement system for modern power networks. Nowadays there is a strong demand from the electricity industry of simple and ready-to-use solutions for calculating uncertainty in such ``new'' measurement systems. To this purpose a simplified approach is presented whose results are shown to be in good agreement with those provided by conventional but more complex methods. Two applications, rather simple but very common, are considered in this paper. In the first one, the measurement of a voltage phasor is considered and the measurement chain is made by an low power instrument transformer (LPIT) and a converter used for adapting the level of signals from the LPIT to the inputs of intelligent electronic device. The second application deals with the measurement of active power of a system made by a low power voltage transformer (LPVT), a low power current transformer and a powermeter.