Universal Grid Analyzer design and development

This paper promotes a better understanding of the power grid quality and dynamics through the introduction of a newly developed Universal Grid Analyzer (UGA). The UGA is a real-time, highly accurate, and GPS synchronized power grid monitoring device used at distribution level. They can function as a power quality analyzer by performing harmonics measurement along with voltage sag and swell detection. They can also be used as a phasor measurement unit (PMU) at distribution level. Accurate synchronous sampling is challenging and it is the hardware core of PMUs, thus a new synchronous sampling method is proposed to achieve accurate synchronous sampling. More importantly, the UGA can analyze power grid signal in a wide-frequency range through the “noise analysis” function, and analyze true synchrophasor measurement errors when the UGA is connected to the power grid. A prototype UGA is built to evaluate functions and measurement accuracy of the UGA.