Power Quality Monitoring and Control Using Virtual Instrumentation System

This paper presents and develops a LabVIEW based mathematical model for power quality analysis and enhancement. The different types of power quality problems such as voltage sag, voltage swell, power frequency distortions, and harmonic distortions can be identified and controlled suitably. Besides standard undisturbed three-phase voltage signal waveforms, six different categories of the PQ disturbances characteristic for real-time power distribution networks can be simulated on the basis of developed virtual instruments: voltage swells, sags, interruptions, high-order voltage harmonics, swells with harmonics and sags with harmonics. Each of simulated PQ disturbances can be predefined and easily changed according to user requirements, using various combinations of the control settings implemented on the virtual instrument front panel. All computations are carried out using LabVIEW 9.0.