Temperature Sensitivity Analysis of a Power Quality Meter Using Thermal Step Test

Power Quality (PQ) meters are rapidly becoming essential instrumentations in many industrial fields. Nowadays, it is fundamental for companies to accurately measure the quality of the electric power plant to avoid critical failure of complex equipment, loss of production, and waste of energy. In this work, a self-developed customized power quality meter has been tested under different thermal conditions, including both extremely cold and extremely hot temperatures. The proposed test plan allows to evaluate the impact that harsh operating conditions have on the functional and reliability performances of the proposed PQ meter. Such experimental characterization is essential to estimate the sensitivity of the meter with respect to the operating temperature, thus validating the performances of the device when operating in a real industrial scenario, characterized by the presence of harsh thermal conditions. The testing procedure presented in this work has been developed covering the range from −40 °C to 120 °C in order to evaluate the negative impact of temperature drifts on the measurements taken with the proposed PQ meter on a wide range of possible applications.