Method for Determining Dissipation Factor of Capacitors Without Reference Capacitor at Voltages up to 1 kV

Abstract

This paper describes a method to determine absolutely the dissipation factor (DF) of a capacitor connected with resistor in series that doesn’t depend on any reference capacitor with a known DF. The method was applied to calibrate the DFs for two capacitor-resistor boxes that had DF ranges of 1 × 10−5 to 1 × 10−2 (C-R connecting box A) and 5 × 10−6 to 5 × 10−3 (C-R connecting box B), together with uncertainty estimation. The principle of the absolute determination is based on “elimination” of the DF of a reference capacitor by subtracting DF readings from two successive measurements. This method was applied to the calibration of DF in the range 5 × 10−6 to 1 × 10−2 at voltages up to 1 kV. Results obtained using this method were confirmed by comparing them with DF obtained using different methods The developed DF standard could be used to calibrate DF for commercial capacitors and DF methods.