Non-Contact Adaptive Voltage Sensor Based on Electric Field Coupling Principle

Non-contact voltage sensors based on the principle of electric field coupling have the advantages of simple loading and unloading, high construction safety, and the fact that they are not affected by line insulation. They can accurately measure line voltage without the need to connect to the measured object. Starting from the principle of non-contact voltage measurement, this article abstracts a non-contact voltage measurement model into the principle of capacitive voltage sharing and deduces its transfer relationship. Secondly, it is theoretically inferred that the edge effect of the traditional symmetric structure sensor plate will cause the actual capacitance value between the sensor plates to be greater than the theoretically calculated capacitance value, resulting in a certain measurement error. Therefore, the addition of an equipotential ring structure is proposed to eliminate the edge additional capacitance caused by the edge effect in order to design the sensor structure. In addition, due to the influence of sensor volume, material dielectric constant, and other factors, the capacitance value of the sensor itself is only at pF level, resulting in poor low-frequency performance and imbuing the sensor with a low voltage division ratio. In this regard, this article analyzes the measurement principle of non-contact voltage sensors. By paralleling ceramic capacitors between the two electrode plates of the sensor, the capacitance of the sensor itself is effectively increased, improving the low-frequency performance of the sensor while also increasing the sensor’s voltage division ratio. In addition, by introducing a single pole double throw switch to switch parallel capacitors with different capacitance values, the sensor can have different voltage division ratios in different measurement scenarios, giving it a certain degree of adaptability. The final sensor prototype was made, and a high and low voltage experimental platform was built to test the sensor performance. The experimental results showed that the sensor has good linearity and high measurement accuracy, with a ratio error of within ±3%.