A magnetoresistive sensor array for nonintrusive power consumption monitoring

Circuit level energy metering is becoming increasingly important in energy savings and demand response applications. While smart meters efficiently monitor the residential energy consumption and make it available to the users, they fail to provide circuit level power consumption. In this study, an array of Giant Magneto Resistive (GMR) sensors are deployed on circuit breakers as stick-on sensors to measure circuit level power consumption. The magnetic field interactions caused by the circuits that are placed close to each other in the circuit breaker box are recorded and their impact on the GMR sensors are eliminated. An inverse model is proposed to remove the effect of cross coupling between the magnetic fields contributed by different circuits.