Power Quality Assessment with Commercial Microcontroller Devices. Repeatability Measurements of On-Board Harmonic Analysis

Abstract

The increasing levels of harmonic pollution and the need of a pervasive monitoring in modern power systems lead to a growing interest in developing low-cost solutions for power quality measurement instrumentation. In this framework, this paper presents an experimental study, aimed at investigating the suitability of using commercial microcontroller devices for power quality assessments. In detail, the attention is focused on the repeatability of measurements performed with such devices. To this aim, harmonic analysis has been implemented on a low-cost commercial board; the signal has been acquired with the on-board ADC; the signal processing algorithm included both a third order time domain interpolation and the FFT analysis. Experimental tests have been carried out with different sampling rates; the measurement results and related dispersion obtained in repeated trials have been compared with those obtained with a higher performance data acquisition board