Guide to modern insulation testing Typical problems during measurements

Elements have the following meaning:

Ut a D.C. test voltage of test equipment
Rguard internal resistance of guard terminal
IA measured current
leakage resistance of test equipment and measuring circuit to
Rlea1
ground
Tested insulation see equivalent circuit in Figure 1
AC mains source mains supply system
Load in mains loop Loading of AC mains (nonlinear loads generate harmonics)
Rlea2 leakage resistance of AC mains to ground
Cstray stray capacitance, it is capacitive coupling of disturbing signal
M mutual inductance, generates induced current in measuring loop.

Use of filters
Noise sources are usually of mains frequency or they fluctuate randomly. Both can be
efficiently smoothed by means of averaging and bandwidth reduction.
Averaging is a method that takes more measurements and gives the result which is the
mean value of them. Mean value is smoothed and has less variations than individual
measurements.
Bandwidth reduction gives improved rejection to noise in frequency band outside of
interest. Narrower bandwidth means less noise, and improves the results similar to
averaging. Averaging can smooth the remaining noise.
Example with TeraOhm
It offers four different filters:
Filter option Meaning
Filter Off Low pass filter with cut off frequency of 0.5 Hz in signal line
Filter 1 Additional low pass filter with cut off frequency of 0.05 Hz in signal line
Filter 2 Filter 1 with increased integrating time (4s)
Filter 3 Filter 2 with additional cyclic averaging of 5 results

Examples of using the filters:

A noise current of 1 mA / 50 Hz adds approximately ±15 % distribution to the measured
result when measuring 1 GΩ with TeraOhm.
By selecting Filter 1 option the distribution will reduce to less than ±2 %.

Testing an object with the following parameters:

Utest =250 V, Inoise = 3 mA, R= 2.4 GΩ, C=220 nF
Filter options give following results:
Filter Off: distribution of results 30 %,
Filter 1: distribution of results 3.5 %,
Filter 2: distribution of results 1.5 %,
Filter 3: distribution of results 0.9 %.
Figure 18 represents results of using different filter options in TeraOhm.

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