Combined Zigbee & GSM approach for AMR in harmonic monitoring and assessment on smartphone

Today's increased use of nonlinear loads injects voltage and current harmonics in Electrical Distribution Networks and creates new problems of Power Quality in the power System. Conventional power systems are designed to operate on sinusoidal power supply. Electric utilities strive to supply consumers with reliable & pure sinusoidal electric power that does not represent a damaging threat to their equipment. In the restructured power system, prices of the power are associated to power Quality. Hence it is very important to monitor and ensure Power Quality. Harmonics is the major issue in this context. This paper presents an innovative way of real time harmonic measurement using ADE 7880 and its assessment with automatic meter reading (AMR) on smart phone. During preparation of this paper fifty sight visits are done covering the non-linear loads like IT Industries, Steel Industries, Paper Industries, workshops etc. It is observed that the current harmonics generated are beyond the tolerable limits. Readings are taken at consumer end with the help of standard power analyzer for a period of 24 hrs. Sample of the readings are considered for analysis purpose. Further it is also observed that many literatures are available in the area of Harmonic measurement but they do not have the capacity to identify the limits of harmonics as per the standards used like IEC 61000-2-2 or IEEE 519-1996 or EN 50160. In this paper GUI is developed in java to assess the harmonics and identify the harmonic presence with specific color codes. The solution will display the abnormal harmonics in red color and normal below the threshold value by the green color. Through this color coding technique an unskilled worker can easily identify the objectionable presence of harmonics. It creates the awareness in the utility for measurement and control of harmonics which in turn helps to improve the Power Quality. A combined Zigbee and GSM technology is also developed to communicate the data received at consumer end to the central server. Along with the central PC information can also be transferred on smart phone by capturing the data from remote location and processing it with a programming tool on smart phone. The main advantage of this method is Remote data logging, as it does not require collecting data physically from actual site. The numeric meter sends data to microcontroller using zigbee module and further to the web server of Central Monitoring System through GSM. This data is processed and analyzed by the source code available in smart phone. For this purpose, the relevant compilers can be installed in the smart phone.