Developing a PQ monitoring system for assessing power quality and critical areas detection

This paper outlines the development of a power quality monitoring system. The system is aimed at assessing power quality and detecting critical areas throughout at distribution system. Such system integrates a hardware system and a software processing tool developed in four main stages. Power quality disturbances are registered by PQ meters and the data is transmitted through a 3G wireless network. This data is processed and filtered in an open source database. Some interesting statistical indices related to voltage sags, swells, flicker and voltage unbalance are obtained. The last stage displays the indices geo-referenced on power quality maps, allowing the identification of critical areas according to different criteria. The results can be analyzed using clustering tools to identify differentiated quality groups in a city. The proposed system is an open source tool useful to electricity utilities to analyze and manage large amount of data.