Grid Tied Multilevel Inverter with Power Quality

Monitoring using myRIO and LabVIEW

Sajjad Ahmed, Muhammad Sohaib Shahid , Hamid Razzaq, Muhammad Umair Aslam
Electrical Engineering, University of Engineering and Technology (UET)
Lahore, Pakistan
sajjadahmed.uet@gmail.com, muhammadsohaibshahid@gmail.com, hamidrazzaq95@gmail.com,
umair94aslam@gmail.com

Project Supervisor: Dr. Syed Abdul Rahman Kashif

Electrical Engineering, University of Engineering and Technology (UET)
Lahore, Pakistan
abdulrahman@uet.edu.pk

The Challenge:
Design of pure sine wave inverter for grid connectivity: Implementation of an inverter
that can yield as much lower possible Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) at the output so
that grid connectivity can be made possible.

Development of a low cost power quality analyzer: To develop an analyzer which is

user friendly and cost efficient. Moreover, the output should be as much accurate as
possible.
Standalone system with a graphical user interface: To reduce the complexity in
hardware and development of a complete industrial product.

The Solution:
Development of a 17-level inverter with capability of grid connectivity: Implemented
17-level inverter for grid connectivity using myRIO and LabVIEW having THD as low
as 1%. Its overall efficiency is high meeting the required international standards for grid
connectivity. The technique used to overcome this hurdle is Switch Ladder Multilevel
Inverter (SLMI) technique.

Low cost solution to power quality analyzer: Developed the power quality analyzer
which can measure all the necessary power system parameters with very high accuracy. It
is also the cost efficient solution for many of the industries.

Standalone system with a graphical user interface: Developed a standalone user

friendly GUI which can display and control all the necessary power quality parameters
from a single screen. Those parameters can also be controlled or monitored from an
online web server by a remote person.
Body:

The project is being done under the supervision of Dr. Syed Abdul Rahman Kashif in
Electrical Engineering Department of University of Engineering and technology
Lahore. The project emphasizes on one of the major problems faced by the Power
sector which is the accurate monitoring of the system.

Engineering Problem:
The project deals with two key challenges of power system i.e

Power quality monitoring

Designing an inverter for grid connectivity

(i) Power Quality monitoring

Power quality monitoring programs are often driven by the demand for improving the
system wide power quality performance. Many industrial and commercial customers
have equipment that is sensitive to power disturbances, and, therefore, it is more
important to understand the quality of power being provided. So keeping the
importance of power quality monitoring in mind project is targeting power quality
monitoring in its first part. The process of gathering data for power quality
monitoring is usually carried out by continuous measurement of voltage and current
over an extended period. Power quality monitoring is the process of gathering,
analyzing, and interpreting raw measurement data into useful information.
Objectives of Power Quality Monitoring:
Monitoring to characterize system performance
Need to understand system performance and then match that system performance with
the needs of customer.
Monitoring to characterize specific problems
Performing short term monitoring at specific customer sites at difficult loads

Monitoring as part of an enhanced power quality service

A provider and customer can together achieve this goal by modifying the
power system or by installing equipment within customer premises.

Monitoring as part of predictive or just-in-time maintenance

Equipment maintenance can be quickly ordered to avoid catastrophic failure

Benefits of Continuous Power Quality Monitoring:

1. Power Quality monitoring provides a continuous Health Check

of a facilitys power system for example;
Harmonic interaction between loads and power conditioning equipment spotted
High Inrush currents from equipment startup detected
 Transients from load switching are seen
2. It acts like a Black Box to tell you what, when, and where a Power Quality
event occurred to prevent it from reoccurring.

Target Applications:
Ideal for circuit monitoring for control panels, switchboards, Motor
control centers and power distribution panels.
Primary monitoring of low and medium voltage application,
requiring full metering with over 100 different electrical
parameters.
Applications Requiring control relays with set-point activation
Heavy Power users for need of clean power

(ii) Designing a Grid Tied Multilevel Inverter

The second part of the project that is grid tied multilevel inverter makes possible the
feeding of externally generated power to the grid. A grid-tie inverter converts direct
current (DC) electricity into an alternating current (AC) suitable for injecting into an
electrical power grid, normally 120V RMS at 60Hz or 240V RMS at 50Hz. Grid-tie
inverters are used between local electrical power generators: solar panel, wind
turbine, hydro-electric, and the grid. In order to inject electrical power efficiently and
safely into the grid, grid-tie inverters must accurately match the voltage and phase of the
grid sine wave AC waveform. The objective of producing the sine waveform at the output
is met by designing a multilevel inverter which has a very low THD at the output.

Systems Description: Raw data for power quality monitoring is collected through
load and is sensed by CTs which outputs the data that is fed directly to myRIO
FPGA for analysis and performing calculations. The various calculations pertaining
to different parameters like voltage, current , THD, harmonics , frequency , active
power and reactive power etc. is done using LabView software. Further, DC
electrical energy being generated from different sources (solar panel, wind etc) is
converted to AC through an multilevel inverter which outputs a pure sine waveform
of AC at the output, thus the grid connectivity is rendered possible. The switching of
MOSFETS is controlled by generating the pulse sequence in LabView.
Why we choosed NI technology :

High data sampling rate of myRio

It includes analog inputs, analog outputs, digital I/O lines, LEDs, a push button, an onboard
accelerometer, a Xilinx FPGA, and a dualcore ARM CortexA9 processor.
Using the LabVIEW development environment and programming language, it is easy to combine
mathematical equations and algorithms with online/real-time measurements of real-world signals while
 taking advantage of the most recent hardware acceleration technologies (multicore, FPGA, DSP) in the
market today.

LabVIEW provides the following key elements that are needed in a flexible, problem-solving tool:
1. Data acquisition tools
2. Data analysis tools
3. Data visualization tools
LabVIEW provides a wide selection of options to present data.
Ability to solve and execute complex algorithms in real time
Shorter time to prototype, time to discovery, time to deployment
Help to develop better, faster algorithms (algorithm engineering)
Tight software-hardware integration (supports wide variety of data acquisition and embedded control
devices)
Easy to learn, use, maintain, and upgrade (intuitive graphical programming, using graphical constructs)
NI-Products Used
Software: LabView
Hardware: myRIO FPGA

LabView Features:
We used many numeric and bolean type controls and indicators for developing our GUI for power quality monitoring.
These controls and indicators really proved helpful in developing a user friendly GUI.
Different Add-ons like Electrical power suit and Signal Processing helped a lot in
developing a simple comprehensive G-code for our project.
The real time simulation and results in LabView helped in plotting and graphing
various electrical parameters in real time and manipulating the gathered data as
the instantaneous values gets updated.
NI training:
We were provided with a Embedded Systems campus workshop that gave
us an hands on experience training on myRIO FPGA and LabView.
Benefits of Solution:
Electric vehicle drivers, motor drivers, active filters, DC power
source utilization, power factor compensator
Low cost solution for industries.
Low cost load quality analysis
Affordable and user friendly
Solution for energy crisis
Safe to use
 Multilevel Inverter making the grid connectivity easy and possible
Interaction with NI: The NI support team of Pakistan helped us in
resolving queries in both hardware and software by guiding us in a
befitting manner.

NI products helped to achieve the objective:

The high data sampling of myRIO , the easy calculations of LabView ,
understandable graphical programming and user friendly GUI of LabView
is all added up to the successful accomplishment of our project.
The Project targets the Power System two major aspects;

(i) Power generation

(ii) Power quality improvement
As the energy demands are increasing with each passing day so it is the need of
hour to look for new sustainable energy resources so that energy can be harnessed
from them and can be fed to main grid so that burden of electrical energy being
generated from coal and fuel can be lessened and Pollution remain very small in the
whole process. The project aims at this goal of producing electrical energy keeping
environment pollution free.
Power quality monitoring is of much importance for making the energy use as
efficient as possible so that both consumer and electric utility companies can get
benefits equally. The second part of the project takes this target into account.
Moreover, the power quality analyzer developed would have a very low cost and
would be as accurate as some of already available power analyzers in the market.

Contact Information:
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Additional Material:
Videos/Pictures Link
Examples of the benefits of using NI products:

NI myRIO is a very powerful processing FPGA with a very high CLOCK speed for
processing and manipulating data. It has a very effective cost and is unmatchable in
its speed and accuracy of measurements as compared to other FPGAs available in
same price. Further, its high sampling rate makes possible the real time
measurements and data processing very accurate which is time saving.