Performance Analysis of Power Quality Monitoring Instruments

This paper moves a step into direction of definition of a test protocol to perform a full metrological characterization of measurement instrument for power quality monitoring. This test protocol will include not only test situations reported in related standards, but also an array of different voltage and current fluctuations - related to common Power Quality issues - that may be encountered in actual power systems. This performance analysis is particularly interesting because it can be found that different Power quality instrument fully meeting characteristics prescribed in standard may still disagree significantly in some actual measurements. After a preliminary discussion about technical and theoretical issues related to performance analysis of these instruments, an implementation of a hardware test system able to reproduce a complete test set is presented. Finally, some preliminary experimental results are presented.