Calibrate Your Power Analyzers and Flickermeters Regular calibration helps ensure compliance to harmonics and flicker requirements. These two EMC standards apply to equipment that draw 16 A of current or less. To ensure your products comply with these two standards, you must properly calibrate the equipment you use to measure harmonic distortion and flicker in a compliance test.
Calibration compensates for the effects of any variables in a measurement system.
To perform compliance tests, you need a power analyzer that can take voltage, current, power, and frequency measurements. These measurements include rms values, average values, real and apparent power, power factors, crest factors, and the level of steady-state and fluctuating harmonics that a product places on the AC mains. The standard mandates that test equipment capture 16 cycles of an AC current waveform and measure the waveform's characteristics continuously and simultaneously with the current harmonics. To calibrate a power analyzer, you need signals of known voltage, current, power, and harmonic content. At first glance, generating power in a reference load and measuring that power with a precision instrument may appear useful in calibrating a power analyzer, but this approach has flaws.