The University of British Columbia

This paper introduces permittivity-shielding which enables the measurement of voltage with very few electric field sensors. Voltage sensor designs using permittivity-shielding can exploit existing optical sensor technology without the need for the expensive and potentially hazardous insulation found in many modern optical voltage transducers (OVTs). Numerical simulations demonstrate that a voltage sensor consisting of 100 M Omega; shielding and six electric field sensors, or less, mounted inside an "off-the-shelf" stand-off insulator can achieve IEC 60044-2 0.2 metering class accuracies ( lt;0.2% magnitude error and lt;10 minutes phase error) even in the presence of strong stray field effects