Development of a Data Acquisition System for the Testing and Verification of Electrical Power Quality Meters

This paper presents the development of a software supported acquisition system for metrological verification and testing of the equipment for monitoring and analysis of the basic electrical power quality parameters. The described procedure consists of two functionally connected segments. The first segment involves generation of the reference three-phase voltage signals, including the possibility of simulation of the various power quality disturbances, typical for electrical power distribution networks. The second part of this procedure includes the real-time recording of power quality disturbances in three-phase distribution networks. The procedure is functionally supported by the virtual instrumentation concept, including a software application developed in LabVIEW environment and data acquisition boards NI 6713 and NI 9215A. The software support of this system performs graphical presentation of the previously generated and recorded signal waveforms. A number of the control functions and buttons, implemented on the virtual instrument front panels, are provided to adjust the basic signal acquisition, generation and recording parameters.