One of the fundamental changes has been to introduce the application of Reference Measuring Systems in the area of impulse testing. The
concept of Reference Measuring Systems in high-voltage impulse testing was
introduced to address questions of quality assurance in measurements, an area
which has seen a significant increase in attention over the past decade.
The need for better quality assurance in high-voltage impulse measurements
was convincingly demonstrated in the 1980s and 1990s through the perfor-mance of several round-robin tests designed to quantify the repeatability of
measurements between different laboratories. These tests comprised circu-lating reference divider systems amongst different laboratories and comparing
the voltage and time parameters of impulses measured with the reference
systems to those derived from the measurement of the same impulses using the
regular laboratory dividers. Analysis of the results of these tests showed that
while some laboratories were able to make repeatable simultaneous measure-ments of the voltage and time parameters of impulses using two Measuring
Systems with good agreement, others were not.