Patron saint of the power quality

Real-time monitoring for power quality, improving equipment operation life

According to the latest research report of Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), major industrial facilities in America lose over 100 billion dollars each year due to electric power problems like power supply variations and voltage disturbance. Flickering of electric lamps at home may not annoy people, but unstable electric power in factories may cause malfunctions or even early breakdown of expensive equipment. Subtle power quality incidents often bypass the traditional protective network and cannot be detected, which leads to equipment degradation over time.

In addition, lots of power quality disturbance originates from the connection of multiple loads to the same network, which leads to the disturbance across nearby facilities and buildings. In order to overcome the challenge of power quality, it is necessary to monitor the disturbance produced by the input and the load. Power quality monitoring can provide appropriate protection for equipment and help confirm suitable mitigation techniques to improve power quality.

Power quality refers to various changing situations of the electric power provided for utility customers, involving wiring problems, grounding issues, switching transients, load variations and harmonic generation. In some situations, poor power quality may not be discovered but will damage expensive equipment. In Europe, the quality of electric energy provided by power grid operators is defined by the reference parameters set in the national grid codes and European standards (EN 50160).

While encountering supply voltage distortion, the devices draws non-sinusoidal current, which may cause technical problems like overheating, malfunction and premature aging etc. Non-sinusoidal current can also lead to thermal and insulation stress for the network devices such as transformers and feeder cables etc. Poor power quality will result in equipment downtime, maintenance activities increase, life time decrease and financial losses finally.

For this purpose, ADI launches a high integration density polyphase analog front end (AFE) with power quality analysis function, which aims to help lengthen the normal working time and working life of industrial equipment. Compared with custom solutions, it can save plenty of time and cost for developers.

Achieving extremely accurate, high-performance power quality monitoring usually needs customized development which costs a lot of money and time. ADE9000 AFE is a off-the-shelf solution that provides embedded power quality algorithm and integrates the high-performance analog-digital converter (ADC) into a single device. This integration can simplify complex algorithm programming, reduce cost, decrease component quantity, accelerate the time to market and achieve high accuracy, ensuring the power quality accord with EN61000-4-30 Class S standard.

Designers using ADE9000 AFE power quality monitoring solution can measure and analyze power contamination and thus prevent disturbance and long-term damage. This product is mainly used for power quality monitoring, electric energy and power monitoring, protective devices, mechanical health condition, smart power distribution units and polyphase energy meters etc.

ADE9000 AFE integrates seven high-performance analog-digital converters, high-end reference voltage sources, flexible digital signal processing (DSP) cores and proprietary algorithm into a single convenient device. Analog-digital converters and reference voltage source drivers achieve high accuracy, provide low drifting over temperature and provide the highest accuracy within the widest dynamic range. The proprietary power quality software of preprogramming provides real-time monitoring and harmonic analysis including the magnitude and phase information. It can achieve timely and cost-saving corrective actions when needed.

ADE9000 can conduct total value and fundamental wave measurement for root-mean-square (rms), active power, reactive power, apparent power and electric energy to provide a complete power monitoring function. Advanced functions such as DIP and SWELL monitoring as well as the measurement of frequency, phase angle, voltage total harmonic distortion (VTHD), input current total harmonic distortion (ITHD) and power-factor etc,. can achieve power quality measurement. It provides the instantaneous rms measurement according to ½ cycle rms calculated by IEC 61000-4-30 Class S algorithm and rms in 10 / 12 cycle in order to conduct real-time monitoring.

ADE9000 provides flexible wave-form buffers which store the samples with a fixed data rate of 32 kSPS or 8 kSPS or the sample rate changing with line frequency in order to ensure that each line cycle provides 128 points precisely. According to IEC 61000-4-7, re-sampling can simplify the fast Fourier transform (FFT) calculation of at least 50 harmonic in the external processor.

In order to assist customers to accelerate product development, ADI also launches EVAL-ADE9000EBZ evaluation board, which enables customers to conduct evaluation on the performance of ADE9000 energy monitoring IC. The evaluation environment is very similar to the deployment environment of actual power quality monitor. This kit needs to purchase the second board that is used for the controller board of system demonstration platform (EVAL-SDP-CB1Z) and current sensor. ADE9000 evaluation kit includes evaluation software which written in LabVIEW® compilation and can visit all the registers and features of this device using a PC interface.

Modern businesses increasingly depend on clean, reliable and constant online electric energy. By adopting new-generation power quality monitoring technology and devices like ADE9000, owners of industrial equipment can anticipate that the situation of premature failure of abrasion of machinery equipment will decrease and clean power supply will bring huge advantages.

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