Enterprise strategies for optimal management of power quality parameters evaluation

Management system requirements has stimulated, over the years, the growth of a data collection culture focused on the evaluation of specific performance parameters. Small and medium enterprises, therefore, have both the opportunity and the need to perform several measurements in order to obtain a confident control over significant targets, though this may represent a limit for companies that reserve limited budgets to measurement campaigns. Nevertheless, to certify quality and/or environmental systems, companies are required to know, and therefore calculate or determine experimentally, maximum values for the significant quantities under observation. Since significant power quality quantities and conducted disturbances values in industrial environment change from plant to plant according to operative conditions, the related tasks may show expensive, and experimental results obtained through a 'one factor at a time' methodology insignificant since they may not take correlations between two different factors into proper account. The present paper provides companies with a novel approach based on factorial techniques for the design of experiments, that allows to obtain fully significant results, reducing the economic burden to perform the experiment. The paper ends with an application of such techniques to an industrial plant the authors have advised about environmental certification.