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A Power Quality Analyzer essentially captures and stores sinusoidal data of the voltage and current and then allows us to analyze and distortion or transients that the recorder saw. It also measures harmonic content, power factor, RMS data, and breaches in any parameters we set. Due to each type of event having an unique thumb print that is specific for that type of event we can tell the customer exactly what that event is and how it is affects their facility. For example the screen shot below we can tell that is a utility capacitor bank, we can tell it did not cause a zero crossing error, but did cause a direct fault on the customer side. We know that VFDs, PLCs and other types of logic have issues with capacitor bank operations.
Going back to the “voltage recorder”. Better, more used terms are Power Quality Analyzer (PQA), Power Quality Recorder, Recording Volt Meter (RVM). Some people refer to all these types of equipment as “Loggers”. This is incorrect, a logger will typically only provide RMS (averaged), snap shot data. Typically no sine wave data. Without sine wave data we can not see events like the below screen shot. Most loggers RMS snap shot in 1 minute intervals (sometimes 1 second), this is actually very very slow sample rate in the electrical world. Our slowest unit we utilize now samples at 512 samples per cycle (60 cycles per second), this unit being a Power Quality Analyzer.
For more information contact APQ at 813-723-2776.
Check out our strategic partner company ALPHA POWER SYSTEMS