Current Ratio and Stability Issues of Electronically Enhanced Current Transformer Stimulated by Stray Inter-Winding Capacitance and Secondary-Side Disturbance Voltage

Electronically enhanced current transformers (EECT) have gained much interest in power quality assessment. Their magnitude and phase angle error, which mainly relates to the properties of the ferromagnetic materials used, the impedance of the secondary load, and the inter-turns capacitance, are thoroughly analyzed. In contrast, the capacitance between the windings, i.e., inter-winding capacitances and their limiting effects on EECT operation, are rarely analyzed in detail—in particular, no details on the control design of the assisting electronic unit, its tuning recommendations, or both are provided. In this paper, the capacitive coupling between indication and compensating winding of EECT with simplified feedthrough construction is analyzed thoroughly in terms of current ratio error and stability of the implemented configuration of the trans-conductance amplifier. The preliminary assumption about the adverse effect of the inter-winding capacitance shunting both ends of the original amplifier, composed of two series-connected inverting amplifier stages, was confirmed and resolved within a modified amplifier with the help of a simplified simulation model and was experimentally proven with measurements on a custom-built EECT prototype. Furthermore, the analyzed phenomena were linked to trans-conductance amplifier parameters, explicitly with its compensating networks, and summarized in their design guidelines. Throughout the paper, the EECT features obtained with original and modified amplifier designs are compared with the plain composite current transformer to demonstrate the benefits of the modified amplifier, especially its robustness against inter-winding capacitance variations.