Development of a DSP-Based Power Quality Monitoring Instrumentfor Real-Time Detection of Power Disturbances

Current trends of power quality monitoring instruments are based on digital signal processors (DSP), which are used to record waveforms and harmonics and comes with software for collecting data and viewing monitoring results. The variations in the DSP based instruments are in the way algorithms that are developed for processing the real-time power quality waveforms. At present, all of the available power quality monitoring instruments are not capable of troubleshooting and diagnosing power quality problems. Therefore, a DSP-based power quality monitoring instrument is proposed for real-time disturbance recognition and source detection. The proposed instrument uses the Texas Instruments TMS32OC6711DSP starter kit with a TI ADS8364EVM analog digital converter mounted on the daughter card. The instrument architecture and the software implementation are discussed in the paper. Preliminary experimental results displaying the fast Fourier transform analysis of the real-time voltage signals are included.