SUMMARY
A simplified Voltage Peak Detection (VPD)-based flickermeter based on spectral decomposition is proposed in this paper to detect flicker caused by high-frequency interharmonic components which effect the illumination of next-generation lamps, such as LEDs and compact fluorescent lamps. The proposed VPD-based flickermeter is specially designed to be robust to fundamental frequency deviations, which is a reality of all power systems. The proposed flickermeter is developed using a sinusoidal voltage model and it is analytically shown that flicker depends on the additive effect of the amplitudes of all the interharmonic components. Flicker results obtained by the proposed VPD-based flickermeter, IEC 61000-4-15 flickermeter, and another spectral analysis based IEC flickermeter are all compared with both synthetic voltage waveforms and field data collected from parts of the electricity transmission system with intermittent loads such as electric arc furnaces. It has been shown that only the proposed VPD-based flickermeter is sensitive to the high-frequency interharmonic components in the voltage spectrum and they are not detected by the other flickermeters. In the literature, there is no flickermeter that considers the flicker effect of the high-frequency interharmonic components and gives accurate results in cases of fundamental frequency deviations at the same time.