Non-intrusive power line quality monitoring based on power line communications

The power line quality has a significant impact on the reliability, delivery efficiency and safety of the power grids and the demands for monitoring the power line quality efficiently at a low cost in the power grid are constantly increasing. In this paper, a non-intrusive power line quality monitoring technique based on the power line communication (PLC) technologies is proposed. Through channel estimation in PLC system, the channel frequency response (CFR) can be obtained. We study the relationship between the CFR and the power line quality features, and find that the changes of certain key channel characteristics of the CFR including the positions and values of the peaks or valleys, the distances between the peaks or valleys and so on could be used to monitor the power line quality in a non-intrusive manner. The computer simulations are also carried out to verify the proposed method and the results show that this method could predict the power line changes well without additional devices and costs.