Development of Alternating Current (AC) Line Monitoring Device for Power System Management

This work presents a study of the effect of imbalance between the supply of and demand of power from the National grid on electrical appliances. In the study, an alternating current (ac) line monitoring device was developed using arduino microcontroller to carry out the investigation. The device is a single system capable of measuring both the main frequency and nominal voltage of electricity supply. The device consists of seven major components: 12 V step-down transformer, half-wave rectifier, attenuator, wave-shaping circuit, arduino microcontroller, Liquid crystal display and micro SD card. The heart of the device is the arduino microcontroller that reads the period of the pulses from the shaping circuit and the output voltage from the scale resistor connected to the attenuator circuit in order to measure the levels frequency and voltage of the ac main source. By graphically compared the reading of the voltage obtained by the ac monitoring device with that of the standard Mastech voltmeter, it was shown that the device has a good correlation with the standard voltmeter with a deviation of ±0.21%, and this has proven that the device is capable of measuring ac voltage accurately. From the frequency test level results, it was found that the frequency measured by the device closely related to the frequency measured by the standard frequency meter. This shows that the device satisfied the requirement of the overall design. Hence, it can be used in the laboratory for demonstration and research purposes as well as in power plant industries. Keywords: Mains frequency, nominal voltage, half-wave rectifier, attenuator, wave-shaping circuit, Arduino microcontrolle