Virtual instrument for monitoring the distribution systems

This paper presents a virtual instrument (VI) for electric power quality monitoring, aiming to act in real-time and to record all typical variations imposed by IEC standards 61000-4-30 and CEI EN 50610. The presented system is flexible and opened to improvements, by means of low-cost digital system development, proving to be an useful tool for power quality monitoring and power management. Voltage and current measurements are made through Hall-effect sensors connected to a standard data acquisition board, and the virtual instrument is built in LabVIEW™, running on Windows in a regular PC. The system acquires data continuously, and stores in files the events that result from anomalies detected in the power system that is being monitored.