A New Power Quality Monitoring System Based on ARM and SOPC

Power quality (PQ) has become a major concern to both electric utilities and customers in recent years and more functions for power quality monitoring system (PQMS) is required. This paper presents a distributed power quality monitoring system that is based on ARM9 and SOPC. ARM9 with the embedded operating system Linux deals with data display and storage. SOPC designed as terminals do data sampling and processing. With the use of Qt/Embedded, the system has a friendly man-machine interface. This system can monitor a number of power-quality indices on every load connected to the same point of common coupling and transmit the measured values to a master device. The master device processes the values to locate the sources of unbalance and harmonic distortion and to quantify the effects of such disturbances on power quality.