Extensive Labview Based Power Quality Monitoring and Protection System

Power quality issues and mitigation techniques became hot research topics soon after the introduction of solid state devices in power system. The equipments of non-linear nature introduce power quality issues such as harmonics, reduction in power factor, voltage unbalance, transients etc. and cause malfunction or damage of power system equipments. In this paper, harmonics, noises, reactive power etc. are considered as major issues. There is an ever increasing need for power quality monitoring systems due to the growing number of sources of disturbances in AC power systems. Monitoring of power quality is essential to maintain proper functioning of utilities, customer services and equipments. The authors surveyed different existing methods of power quality monitoring already in use and available in literature and arrived at the conclusion that an improved and affordable power quality monitoring system is the need of the hour. This paper presents the development of a simple power quality system for the purpose of measurement by designing virtual instruments using LabVIEW software. The real time data of hardware are acquired and fed to the software using Arduino for interfacing with LabVIEW. All power quality parameters are also measured by fluke power analyzer for validation. Observations taken from the hardware under test depict the importance of power quality monitoring, and also the accuracy and the precision of the developed system. The testing results and analysis indicate that the proposed method is feasible and practical for analyzing power quality disturbances.