Development of a Novel Power Quality Monitoring and Report-Back System

A novel power quality (PQ) monitoring and report-back system is designed in this paper to achieve the goal of real-time PQ monitoring and recording. The MCU used in the proposed analyzer is C8051F320 designed by Silicon Laboratories. C8051F320 is an integrated mixed-signal system-on-a-chip MCU featuring universal serial bus (USB) interface; therefore, it can be used for high-speed and large-quantity data transmission. A USB-based PQ analyzer with appropriately designed I/O interface and peripherals is designed and implemented firstly. Then, two human-machine interfaces (HMIs) designed for personal computer (PC) and personal digital assistant (PDA) are developed. The HMI for PDA can achieve the PQ monitoring with tiny volume and mobility requirements. Besides, a global system for mobile communication (GSM) module is developed and integrated into the proposed analyzer to realize the report-back system. When PQ indices such as total harmonic distortion exceed the predetermined limit, a message will be sent to operator´s cell phone by the short message service of GSM. Operators can then identify the PQ problems happened at the monitoring place. All functions implemented in this paper can realize the intelligent and real-time PQ monitoring and report-back system. Experimental results demonstrate the validity of the proposed system