A new non-invasive voltage measurement method for wireless analysis of electrical parameters and power quality

The analysis of voltage and current waveforms is important for estimating the quality of the electric power system. In this paper we propose a non-invasive approach for measuring the voltage waveform of conductive elements such as wires or cables. This non-intrusive sensor does not require any electrical contact to the mains electricity, which makes the measurement much safer and easy. The voltage is measured by exploiting coupling-capacitance elements. With this approach, the harmonic content and the amplitude of the voltage signal is evaluated and transmitted. We also present a wireless sensor network designed to implement the proposed non-invasive voltage measurement method. Each node features a low-power, 32-bit microcontroller and a wireless transceiver to send data via the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. Finally, we compare the proposed non-intrusive method with measurements using the direct access to the wire and we demonstrate that we achieve high accuracy with a maximum error lower than 1%.