Power quality analysis extension

Outram Research has announced a new revision of firmware for their PM7000 power quality analyser, Waveform Capture Extension, which allows capture of long-duration transients and waveform events. The new feature is designed to help engineers troubleshoot long-duration problems and to see the consequential impact of disturbances.

Whilst most transients and waveform events are over in less than three or four cycles, occasionally it is useful to capture longer periods. Examples include monitoring the network’s recovery from sag after reclosures, or to view the reaction of downstream control systems such as wind turbine control.

The Waveform Capture Extension allows for selective extension of the capture window beyond the 160ms that was previously possible, enabling recording for up to 60 seconds. Extensions of the different capture triggers can be set individually, enabling complete control over the monitoring of the disturbances that are recorded for the longer period. The PM7000 can automatically terminate recording when the Sag/Surge is over to optimise the use of the available storage.

Waveforms recorded by the Extended Waveform Capture feature can be displayed and analysed in Pronto, Outram’s logger control software that will also manage the data, produce comprehensive graphs, generate reports and export the waveform sample data to other desktop software packages such as Microsoft Excel.

The new firmware and Extended Waveform Capture feature are fully backwards-compatible, allowing previously saved configurations to be used without modification. Furthermore new configurations can be loaded into a PM7000 with older firmware, with the settings for Extended Waveform Capture ignored if the feature is not available.

The new Extended Waveform Capture feature is now provided as standard across the family of Outram Ranger PM7000 power analysers. New firmware to upgrade existing analysers is available on request.