A New Multi-Platform Data Acquisition System for Power Quality Metrological Certification

In order to provide power quality monitoring activities with metrological certification, a DAS (data acquisition system) has been designed, realized and characterized. The system allows acquisition on tri-phases plus neutral lines picking up 499 samples per period of the fundamental at 50 Hz. To ensure certified measurements, the system gets external certified time and voltage references. The system uses a FTDI Virtual Com Port Driver to communicate data over High Speed RS232 virtual interface and it does not need any advanced programming skill. The choice to use a virtual serial communication makes the data acquisition software portable over many platforms, regardless by the development environment and by the programming language. To test the proposed device some custom software have been written in many programming language (C#, VB6, LabView, MatLab), moreover in order to characterize the device the most common ADC (analog to digital converter) performing test have been applied