New Circuit Parameter Design of Lightning Impulse Voltage Testing Circuit for Low-Inductance Loads

Abstract

This paper presents new circuit parameter design of the lightning impulse voltage generator for testing low inductance load, such as low voltage winding of transformers and air core reactors using the impulse voltage generation circuit called Glaninger’s circuit to generate the lightning impulse voltage in order to obtain lightning impulse voltage waveform according to IEC60060-1 standard requirement. The IEC standard defines the lightning impulse voltage waveform parameters and tolerance as follows; front time is 1.2 ms ±30%, time to half is 50 ms ±20%, and under-shoot shall not exceed 50% of the peak voltage. From the experiment, the conventional impulse voltage generation circuit cannot generate the impulse voltage according to the IEC standard requirement when low inductance load was tested because time to half of the generated voltage will be less than 40 ms, but Glaninger’s circuit can generate the impulse voltage of which waveform parameters according to the IEC standard requirement. However, it is found that in the previous literatures the approach to select the circuit parameters for Glaninger’s circuit cannot provide the waveforms according to the standard requirement. Therefore, this paper presents the systematic parameters calculation of an impulse voltage generator. To verify the design in this paper, the designed parameters were simulated by computer program and practically tested in a high voltage laboratory.