A practical framework for applying effects of various lamps on IEC flickermeter and evaluating results in a welding system

The flicker phenomenon, as a power quality aspect, can be measured by the standard IEC flickermeter that has been widely accepted as an international standard for flicker severity measurement. The standard IEC flickermeter is unable to measure the flicker effect of various lamps. It is possible that interharmonics appear in a system that causes flicker in some kinds of lamps but the IEC flickermeter shows that flicker does not exist in those systems. In this paper, this deficiency is evaluated and an appropriate way for considering the effect of various lamps is presented by decomposing the lamp–eye–brain model into two parts. From laboratory work, the gain factors of two kinds of lamps are obtained and evaluated using the measuring system of the IEC flickermeter. In order to estimate the gain factor of a lamp through an appropriate transfer function, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is also applied. In a simulated system whose flicker source is a welding system, flicker effect on various lamps is evaluated.