Network Infrastructure for Power Quality Metering

The project deals with the design of a distributed network infrastructure for power quality measurements at electric transportation systems, industrial plants, power generation sites. The yielded power quality measurements are harmonics, time domain waveform, rms, active/reactive power and power factor, amplitude and power spectrum, frequency tracking, voltage sags and swells and voltage interruption, transient analysis.

The system network is designed to connect local area networks of power quality measurement units to a central server. The central server provides web services allowing a workstation equipped with the proper application to remotely control, configure, monitor each device in the network. The application for remote control has a user friendly interface is available and since it is Java based, it is platform independent. The system is developed to handle also measurement units that are moving such as devices deployed on trains. All measurement devices are time synchronized to allow temporal comparison of measurement data coming from different units.

The application for remote control allows:

• monitoring the diagnostic state: battery level, battery status (charging or not), temperature and status of internal modules, time synchronization, power harvesting, etc.
• device configuration:
  •  channel: enable/disable, gain/attenuation, sampling frequency, anti-aliasing filter cut-off frequency
  • front-end: probe selection (voltage, current, electromagnetic or optical fibre), scale
• device control: a set of commands that allow putting the device in sleep mode, waking it up, starting/pausing/stopping the recording, enabling or disabling internal modules, running a calibration or test procedure, etc.
  
•  receiving measurement data and controlling the measurement data stream.