Daniele Gallo, Giacomo Ianniello, Carmine Landi, Mario Luiso
AN ADVANCED ENERGY/POWER METER BASED ON ARM MICROCONTROLLER FOR SMART GRID APPLICATIONS
The Smart Grids are an electricity delivery system which monitors, protects and optimizes the operation of its interconnected elements from end to end. They include central and distributed renewable energy generators through the electrical network. Thus, it can easily be argued that they are characterized by great issues to manage the whole system and to assuring a proper energy quality. In this scenario the possibility to have advanced power/energy meter with energy quality monitoring and communication capabilities is of great interest. So, in this paper the design and implementation of a wattmeter for single phase electrical systems based on an ARM microcontroller is presented. The wattmeter is composed of measurement transducers (for voltage and current), conditioning, acquisition, processing and communication sections; the last three are embedded in the microcontroller. Other than typical wattmeter tasks, the system is capable to measure some power quality parameters. Moreover communication is performed through an USB based transfer block to an Host Pc, through which it can be configured. Even if it is designed to respect on-line measurement constraint, it remains a low cost system. In the paper experimental results related to characterization are also described.