zEnergy: An open source project for power quality assessment and monitoring

Abstract

In this paper, a new open source project focused on power quality assessment and monitoring for low voltage power systems is presented. Power quality (PQ) is a crucial matter for proper and reliable operation of industrial or home electrical appliances. In order to improve PQ techniques, efforts are made to develop smart sensors that can report near real-time data. Proprietary software and hardware on dedicated computers or servers processes these data and shows relevant information through tables or graphics. In this situation, interoperability, compatibility and scalability are not possible because of the lack of open protocols. In our work, we introduce zEnergy, an open source platform for computing, storing and managing all of the information generated from smart sensors. We apply the most up-to-date algorithms developed for power quality, event detection, and harmonic analysis or power metering. zEnergy makes use of cutting-edge web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript to provide user-friendly interaction and powerful capabilities for the analysis, measurement and monitoring of power systems. All software used in our work is open source, running on Linux.