Design of virtual power frequency meter based on IEC 61000-4-30 power quality standard

This paper presents the design of power frequency meter based on IEC 61000-4-30 standard using virtual instrument approach. The virtual power frequency meter hardware consists of a zero crossing detection circuitry and a low cost USB data acquisition card. The proposed virtual power frequency meter design utilizes the zero crossing detection circuitry and the counter unit of the data acquisition card to count the number of zero crosses produces by the power system sinusoidal waveform. The computer system clock is used to keep track of the total number of zero crosses counted in every 10 seconds interval to computes the power frequency which can achieve up to 0.05Hz resolution. This method greatly simplifies the hardware implementation and reduces computation complexity in software. The virtual power frequency meter was successfully implemented and tested on wall power socket. This paper demonstrates the implementation of virtual power frequency meter using zero cross detector and counter unit that compliance with IEC 61000-4-30 standard.