According to the requirements of IEC standard

the high accuracy impulse voltage calibrator is used to calibrating the digital recorder. In order to calibrate the complete measuring system composed of impulse resistance divider and digital recorder

the principle

design and construction of a pulse voltage calibrator for generating the lightning impulse according to IEC 60060-1—2001 is introduced. The calibrator is a small MAX generator. And the peak value of voltage Up

front time T1

and time to half value T2 of the generated impulse are calculated from the calibrated values of the components in the impulse-forming circuit. The peak voltage output of the calibrator is from 80 V to 1 000 V

and the theoretical time parameter is（0.791/58.22） μs. The deviations of the calibrated digital recorder are from 0to 0.8‰ for the peak value of voltage

from-2‰ to 3‰ for the front time T1

and from-1‰ to 0.8‰for the time to half value T2

satisfying the accuracy requirements of ±1‰ for the peak value of impulse voltage and less than ±1% for the time parameters. Repeating 20 measurements

the max standard deviation is 2.5×10-4. In whole year

the deviation of the peak value of voltage keeps less than 0.3‰. The calibrator can be used as the primary reference of impulse voltages for calibration of high voltage. An impulse resistance divider with a resistance of 3.25 kΩ is calibrated by the calibrator

and a dividing ratio of93.42 is obtained

which agrees with the result of frequency response test

and the time parameters also coincide with the theoretical calculation value via MATLAB. It is concluded that the low impedance calibrator can also be applied to calibration of impulse resistance divider.