High-speed distributed acquisition network for fast transient measurement

In power substations, switching operations of circuit breakers and disconnect switches generate transient electromagnetic emissions, which may interfere with the normal operations of electronic equipments. This study introduces the design of a novel wireless transient measurement system for measuring or monitoring transient electromagnetic emissions in power substations. Unlike traditional transient measurement systems that use several standalone waveform recording equipment, the presented system, adopting novel network measurement concept, works as a truly automatically controlled interactive data acquisition multi-node network, and has the ability to provide time-correlated data from numerous sensors. The accuracy of time correlation is smaller than 1.4 μs. As a result, it provides excellent scalability and is well suited for the measurement of analogue signals spread over a large physical space with time synchronisation. Another major difference is that the new system uses wireless links and programmable devices to replace cables and data acquisition equipment of currently available systems, thus making the new measurement system more compact, flexible and much more powerful. The designed measurement units could do both time-domain measurement and real time spectrum analysis.