Uncertainty assessment of a resistive voltage divider for binary step-up method implementation in HVDC applications

Abstract

The most used methods for determining the ratio of High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) standard resistive dividers are described in this paper. The binary step-up method was chosen to metrologically characterize a HVDC resistive divider, in order to achieve local traceability to the SI from Josephson Voltage Standards. A Monte Carlo-based simulation was performed to estimate the uncertainty levels of each step from 1.25 kV up to 10 kV, considering that the main components are the uncertainty of the digital multimeter and the voltage source. It was found a variation up to 64-fold in the standard deviation of the voltage output, for a uniform distribution, when the voltage source uncertainty was increased up to 10-fold.