Distributed Power Quality Monitoring using Wireless Sensor Networks
M. Ramakrishnan P. Vanaja Ranjan
Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering,
College of Engineering, Guindy, Anna University
Chennai.
Abstract
Nowadays power quality (PQ) is the major issue for
both electrical utilities and consumers, as the
deregulation of power market happens all around the
world. In this context, power quality attracts the
research interest of both academia and the industrial
community. This paper deals with the design of
distributed power quality monitoring using wireless
Power Quality Monitoring Nodes (PQMN). The design
of intelligent PQMN which does the data acquisition,
signal processing and wireless information transfer is
reported. The wireless PQMNs are connected to the
Ethernet backbone network through the embedded
gateway nodes.
Keywords: Distributed Power Quality Monitoring,
Wireless Sensor Networks, Embedded Web Server
1. INTRODUCTION
In recent years research in power quality gets greater
momentum and the term power quality itself gets
significance among the electric utilities and industrial
power consumers due to the deregulation of the power
market. In this scenario, the consumer has an option to
select the power suppliers not only according to the
cost of power but also the reliability of the power (i.e.)
Power Quality. According to the IEEE power quality
monitoring standards Power Quality is defined as
powering the sensitive equipment in a manner that is
suitable for the operation of that equipment [1]. As far
as the industries are concerned, power quality is getting
the power with the contracted specifications without
any interruption and any power disturbances from the
utilities. The North American industries are losing
billions of dollars because of power quality problems
[2].
Power quality disturbances can be broadly classified
into the following categories [3]. i) Power frequency
disturbances: They are low frequency phenomena that
results in voltage sag and swells. ii) Power system
transients: They are a fast short time duration event that
provides distortions. iii) Power System Harmonics: It is
the existence of multiple frequencies in the system.
This happens due to the non linear load. Sometimes
interaction of the harmonics with the power system
parameters(R-L-C) make the harmonics to multiply,
Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering,
College of Engineering, Guindy, Anna University
Chennai
which leads to severe consequences. iv) Electro static
interference and electro magnetic interferences are
other power quality issues.
The paper is organized as follows. Section II
discusses about the various power quality monitoring
systems reported in the literature elaborately and the
section III describes the distributed wireless power
quality monitoring architecture. Section IV discusses
about the firmware design in the PQMN and the
gateway node. And section V discusses about the
experimental results.
2. RELATED WORK
In the literature there has been lots of work done on
distributed power quality monitoring system.
Reference [4] discusses about the optimal number and
location of power quality monitor in a power system to
reduce cost and redundant data. Microcomputer acts as
power quality info nodes (PQIN) and they are
connected to each other through internet. An algorithm
is proposed to find the optimal number and location of
Power Quality Monitor. An internet based power
quality monitoring system is proposed in [5]. This
paper deals about development of software modules to
integrate various commercial power quality meter
output. In reference [6] the usage of energy monitoring
system is justified. The paper states that continuous
monitoring will yield a better savings due to the
preventive maintenance. It is also stated that the site
engineer can plan for the expansion by doing load
prediction from the continuous monitoring. In
reference [7] power quality problems voltage swells
and sags occurred in the field have been reported. The
PQ information are drawn from the data collected over
the span of 4 years. Reference [8] proposes a combined
metering system for various sites of the industry spread
across the geographical area. It is also stated that the
combination of continuous power and energy
monitoring along with the power quality monitoring is
an effective method of obtaining power system
information to enhance the reliability of the
manufacturing unit. In [9] S. R. IGabram et al are
reported a theoretical approach for power quality
monitoring using MEMS wireless current sensor. It is
also stated that the loss due to harmonics cost around
15% of the total fundamental loss cost. It divides the
design phase of wireless power quality monitoring
system into four phases as sensor design phase, circuit
 Process Process Process
Unit I Unit I Unit I

Client
Control Room
RF module

Internet

PQMN Embedded Web Server Personal Computer

Figure 1. Distributed Wireless Power Quality Monitoring Architecture

which the sensor output is connected. It has 1K
designing phase, communication layer design phase EEPROM and Capture/Compare/PWM modules.
and software design phase. Rs232 port
3. Power quality monitoring using
Wireless Sensor Networks
The proposed distributed wireless power quality Adf7020-1 PIC18f4620 Sensors
monitoring system is given in figure 1. This power
quality monitoring system can be implemented in the
industrial environment where the different process unit
are physically apart. The Power Quality Monitoring Power supply
Nodes (PQMN) with current sensors senses the
instantaneous current and finds the frequency
component in it by an Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) Figure 2. Power quality monitoring node Block
algorithm embedded in it and sends power spectral Diagram
density details to base station which is connected to the
Ethernet backbone network. The remote client or the
local client in the network can take the Power Quality
information and stores it in the database for the post
processing.
As the embedded gateway node acts as a web
server the client does not need to run the specialized
software other than a simple browser to retrieve the
information.

4. Design of Power Quality Monitoring

Node
The core of the PQMN node is its
microcontroller PIC18F4620. It has 64K flash, 4K
RAM, 13 channel 10 bit Analog to Digital Converter to
Figure 3. Power Quality Monitoring Node with Battery
The block diagram and photograph of PQMN is shown
in the figures. The node has a half duplex transceiver start start
ADF7020-1, which is a low power highly integrated
FSK/GFSK/ASK/OOK/GOOK transceiver designed
Start A/D conversion
for operating in the low UHF and VHF band. The Initialize A/D
operating frequency for this transceiver can be set converter
anywhere between 135MHz to 650MHz. By using the Store digital value in
‘divide by two’ mechanism, the operating frequency buffer
can be reduced to 80MHz. The transmitter output Initialize Timer.
power is programmable in 63 steps from -20dBm to Load 40µs count
+13dBm. As the power quality monitoring nodes are to timer Increment buffer
line powered, there is no much attention to be given for count (BC)
the power conservation during communication layer
design. stop

4.1 SENSORS (a) Is

BC=1024
?
A low resistive shunt is used to measure the
current.
N P Reload timer value
Stop timer
Dataprocess_flag =1
Signal
conditio stop
PQMN
ning
circuit (b)

Figure 4 Current sensing Arrangement Figure 5. (a) Data Acquisition module main loop (b)
Timer ISR
As the ADC of the PIC18F4620 requires the unipolar
signal, signal conditioning circuit has a clamper to shift 4.2.2 DATA PROCESSING PART:
the DC level of the bipolar voltage signal proposional
to the line current. The software has to be done such start
that the digital sample for the current is taken at the
sampling frequency of 25kHz to accommodate two
power cycles in 1024 data samples. The signal Level shift 1024 byte data
conditioning circuit has the amplifier to amplify the
incoming signal to make use of the full dynamic range Convert the data into current equivalent
of ADC of PIC microcontroller.
Do FFT calculation
4.2 FIRMWARE DESIGN FOR PQMN
The firmware is developed in C language using a cross Find the magnitude of complex o/p of FFT
compiler The firmware design of PQMN has three
parts. They are
1. Data acquisition part Calculate the THD
2. Data processing part
3. Communication layer part
Pack the PQ information into a packet
4.2.1 DATA ACQUISITION PART:
Set packet arrival flag
As the signal capturing and signal processing is
taking place in an 8 bit processor, 8 bit resolution is
used. The conversion time required by ADC of PIC
microcontroller is 0.7us. The firmware is designed to Stop
take the samples after every 40 µs. That is the sampling
frequency is set to 25KHz. Figure 6. Flow chart for data processing
The data processing module only gets executed after PQMN node is set to report the PQ information to the
the data acquisition module fills the entire buffer. In base station periodically. The communication software
the data processing module first the unipolar signal is has been developed with the following packet structure
converted into bipolar signal by level shifting the
acquired data. Then it is converted into its current
equivalent and then the FFT is calculated. To find the CRC0 CRC1 PL DATA
power spectral density at various frequencies the
magnitude of the complex quantity is found. The total
Figure 8. Packet structure
harmonic distortion (THD) is found out. Total
harmonic distortion and the power spectral densities at
various frequencies are packed as a single packet. After First two bytes are for cyclic redundancy check (CRC).
This is to ensure the packet integrity as the wireless
that the communication layer module sends the packet
channel is not reliable. The third byte holds the packet
wirelessly.
length which is the length of the data bytes followed.
Here the Manchester encoding is done for the proper
reception of data though the reception of continuous
4.2.3 COMMUNICATION LAYER PART: 1’s or 0’s occurs.
In this wireless distributed power quality
monitoring system single hop communication is used.
5. EMBEDDED GATEWAY NODE
That is for all PQMN nodes the base station is in its
5.1 HARDWARE DESCRIPTION
radio range and the topology is simple star topology.
Carrier Sense Multiple Access /Collision Avoidance
The Rabbit Semiconductor’s RCM4000
(CSMA/CA) is used in the MAC layer. The digital
Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) capability of module development board is used as the gateway
node. This module has rabbit 4000, a 16 bit processor
ADF7020-, facilitates the development of CSMA/CA.
which operates at the clock speed up to 60MHz. The
There is no need for the specialized routing protocol as
processor also features I/O lines shared with five serial
PQ monitoring architecture consist only the single hop
wireless network. ports and four levels of alternate pin function that
include variable phase PWM, auxiliary I/O, quadrature
decoder and input capture. This module has an
start integrated 10 base T Ethernet port which allows the
node to be connected to the IP networks. This
Sense the carrier presence (RSSI) microprocessor has 512K Flash and 512K SRAM. The
wireless node is connected to the gateway node through
the serial Interface and the gateway node is connected
to the IP network through the switch.
Is
medium
idle?

Yes
Wait for channel

Increment the retry count

Transmit the packet

Is count
<3?

Drop the packet

Figure 9. Rabbit RCM4000 Gateway Node

5.2 FIRMWARE DESCRIPTION

For the distributed PQ monitoring system, the
stop
As the ADC of firmware is written in the gateway node such that it
Figure 7. Simple CSMA/CA for PQMN will act as a HTTP server so that there is no need for
the specialized software in the client machine other
than a simple browser. The firmware in the gateway is
developed using Dynamic C IDE. This IDE has TCP/IP
and HTTP libraries to support the development of
embedded Ethernet application. The application along
with the web pages is embedded into the processor
memory. The web pages are developed with Server
Side Include (SSI) directives to serve the dynamic
sensor data to the client machine.
Figure 10. Algorithm for the Gateway Node
For the distributed Power Quality monitoring, a HTTP
form interface is used. A web interface is designed for
the client system in the intranet/ internet to monitor the
current harmonic levels of different process unit in an
industry. The figure 10 shows the web interface.
Figure 11. Speed monitoring and control form in client
To restrict access to the PQ data, a HTTP digest
authentication is used by the gateway node. The client
machine view of the HTTP form for the power quality
monitoring application is given in figure 10. A Java
application is also developed in the client side to
continuously retrieve the power quality information
from the PQ monitoring system and the power quality
information are stored in the database for the post
processing.
6. CONCLUSION
This paper reports about the design of the distributed
power quality monitoring system using wireless sensor
networks. The proposed system can be deployed in the
industries like electric arc furnaces where the
continuous power quality monitoring is required. Most
of the studies reveal that the continuous power quality
monitoring will help the industry for the preventive
maintenance and avoiding unplanned shut down. The
firmware development of the Power Quality
Monitoring Node (PQMN) is also detailed elaborately.
A rabbit microprocessor based gateway node connects
the wireless network to the Ethernet backbone network,
through which the client can access the Power Quality
information. The firmware design in the gateway node
is detailed in this paper. A Java program is also
developed which will run in client machine to collect
the PQ information and store it in a database for post
processing of PQ information.
In future the 8 bit current sensor nodes can be replaced
by 32 bit current sensor nodes which will do more data
processing in the PQMN itself and send only required
information.
7. REFERENCES
[1] IEEE Recommended Practice for Monitoring
Electric Power Quality,IEEE Standard IEEE Std 1159-
1995.
[2] Byman, Ben, Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Rudolf,
Yarborough, Tom, Van Gorp, John, “Using Distributed
Power quality Monitoring for Better Electrical System
Mamagement,” in IEEE 1998
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FOR BETTER ELECTRICAL SYSTEM
MANAGEMENT", IEEE transaction on industrial
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1485
[3] C. Sankaran , "Power Quality", CRC PRESS 2002
[4] M. A. Eldery, E. E El-Saadany, M. M. A. Salama,
"Optimum Number and Location of Power Quality
Monitors", 11th International Conference on
Harmonics and Quality of Power 2004
[5] Maxwell E. MONTEIRO, Elton S. MOURA,
Adrian B. DRAGO, Luiz 0. BONINO, Josi G.
PEREIRA P, Paul0 F. S. AMARAL, Domingos S. L.
SIMONETTI, Pedro. F. ROSA, Geraldo D.
BAZELATT0, "An Internet-Based Power Quality
Monitoring System" IEEE International symposium on
Industrial electronics 2003.
[6] Anne P. Stublen, Craig M.Wellan, Steven A. Kell,
and Terry W. Langston, "Justifing and Planning An
Energy Monitoring System", IEEE Indstry Application
Magazine 1997
[7]Douglas S . Don, "Point of Utilization Power
Quality Study Results",IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON
INDUSTRY APPLICATIONS, VOL. 31, NO. 4,
JULY/AUGUST 1995
[8]
[9] S. R. I. Gabran, G. S. A. Shaker, E. F. El-Saadany,
M. M. A. Salama, ” Real-Time Power Quality
Monitoring Using MEMS Based Wireless Current
Sensors “,Proceedings of the IEEE International
Conference on Mechatronics & Automation Niagara
Falls, Canada • July 2005