Low-Cost Power Harmonics Analyzer of Nonlinear Loads Based on FPGA

Power quality monitoring is one of the major concerns in modern industry in order to save expenses, accomplish with IEEE standards and increase useful life cycle of electrical devices. Harmonic content of nonlinear loads causes several problems at industry, being necessary its continuous monitoring and analysis. Previous works for power quality monitoring depend on a computer for data processing, displaying only a few power quality indices; on the other hand, commercially available products are highly priced and unsuited for continuous monitoring. The novelty of this work is the proposal of a real-time standalone instrument to analyze power harmonics for nonlinear loads, capable to calculate enough indices to perform a reliable power quality assessment. The contribution of this work is that the proposed algorithm is implemented into a low-cost FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) offering a special purpose SoC (System on-a chip) solution being accessible by most industries to meet continuous on-line monitoring requirements. Two cases of study are presented to demonstrate the implementation performance. The developed instrument is compared with a commercial product in order to validate results.