Low-Cost Power Harmonics Analyzer of Nonlinear Loads Based on FPGA

Abstract

Power quality monitoring is one of the major concerns in modern industry in order to save expenses, accomplish with IEEE standards and increase useful life cycle of electrical devices. Harmonic content of nonlinear loads causes several problems at industry, being necessary its continuous monitoring and analysis. Previous works for power quality monitoring depend on a computer for data processing, displaying only afew power quality indices; on the other hand, commercially available products are highly priced and unsuitedfor continuous monitoring. The novelty of this work is the proposal of a real-time standalone instrument to analyze power harmonics for nonlinear loads, capable to calculate enough indices to perform a reliable power quality assessment. The contribution of this work is that the proposed algorithm is implemented into a low-cost FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) offering a special purpose SoC (System on-a chip) solution being accessible by most industries to meet continuous on-line monitoring requirements. Two cases of study are presented to demonstrate the implementation performance. The developed instrument is compared with a commercialproduct in order to validate results.

Reconfigurable instrument for power quality monitoring in 3-phase power systems

“…In a previously developed work [1], an FPGA-based PQ monitoring tool for surveillance of 1-phase electric systems is presented, this development counted with a graphic user interface composed of a VGA display and an LCD. The present work extends that carried out in [1] in order to include surveillance for 3-phase low-power systems.…”

“…From these signals, it is possible to obtain relevant information regarding the characteristics of the analyzed system like signal amplitude, frequency, harmonic contents, phase, among others. This information is useful to solve some problems in several industrial and scientific applications as: power quality (PQ) monitoring [1], monitoring and diagnosis of electrical machines [2], electric systems protection [3], and control [4], among others.…”

“…Field programmable gate array (FPGA) devices have been used in several research works regarding to electric parameter monitoring [1][2][3][4][5], due to their flexibility, reconfigurability and low cost. Furthermore, FPGA devices allow the implementation of several algorithms in the same die, offering an online and portable System on Chip (SoC) solution for innumerable real-time applications different from PC-based analysis techniques, which are in general offline.…”

“…For instance, in [1] an FPGA-based monitoring system for power quality observation in a single-phase power system is proposed. In [5] a smart sensor for high-resolution frequency estimation in power systems is proposed based on the hardware implementation of the Chirp-Z transform in an FPGA device, which allows real time frequency estimations in accordance with international standards for PQ monitoring [6,7].…”

Power quality disturbance detection and classification using signal processing and soft computing techniques: A comprehensive review

“…Figure 1 shows the status of PQ detection field representing its popularity. 7,8 However, at times, the info presented by means of the traditional standards is unsatisfactory. It indicates that the PQ, as an ongoing issue, adds significant attention to power system researchers.…”