Development of an Electrical Power Quality Monitor based on a PC

This paper describes an electric power quality monitor developed at the University of Minho. The hardware of the monitor is constituted by four current sensors based on Rogowski effect, four voltage sensors based on Hall effect, a signal conditioning board and a computer. The software of the monitor consists of several applications, and it is based on LabVIEW. The developed applications allow the equipment to function as a digital scope, analyze harmonic content, detect and record disturbances in the voltage (wave shapes, sags, swells, and interruptions), measure energy, power, unbalances, power factor, register and visualize strip charts, register a great number of data in the hard drive and generate reports. This article also depicts an electrical power quality monitor integrated into active power filters developed at the University of Minho.