Monitoring Power Fluctuations

Mains AC voltage drops to zero 100 or 120 times per second depending on whether the supply is 50Hz or 60Hz. How is an alarm going to detect "nanoseconds" of voltage fluctuation in that environment?

In many cases good quality electronics power supply's will ride right through a second or so of complete power outage. Its the longer ones that typically will cause stuff to drop out or have a problem.

There are power line monitoring software systems that can do real time data recording and can tell you exactly what happens during a power blink and for how long as well.

With real time data relating to the specifics of how long and what happened during a power blink its much easier to determine what may have caused it as well.

What kind of electronics are you dealing with?

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For nano seconds or lesser fluctuations, we can call the wave form distortion. Good harmonic monotors, which show the harmonic distortion at particaular time and THD, can solve your problem

OK?

There are lots of Power Monitors online which continuously monitors & records, analyzes power conditions of 1 or 3 Φ AC power.

Search Google or have your own search style

Well you monitoring the equipments are possible and resting it every time a power fluctuation occurs. Yet, if the equipments you are dealing with are mostly single phase, 120V it might be less expansive to install UPS. They don't have to be big. Just good enough to run the equipments for few minutes.

That way you protect the equipments "most UPSs have surge protectors". And also you may never need to rest any of the equipments.

Furthermore, if you would like to set a UPS system for the whole facility regardless of the phase, voltage... it is very great idea. However, it will cost allot.

Places like the pentagon have such setup to insure the continuous power supply for the entire facility. The UPS only serves for few seconds while the generators are powered up, in the case of power outage. And they insure a clean power supply with no fluctuations or distortions.

You may also want to install a surge protector for the entire place which would help suppress and spikes in the power which might cause some of your trouble

MCS Electrical

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If the droupouts are very short duration ( less than 2 or 3 seconds) you might consider a short term ups that uses capacitor banks. That solves battery issues and they should be less expensive to buy. A lot of companies make transient detectors but usually as part of power disturbance instruments.

Check into a system called IGrid. It can monitor your incoming power supply and send you a page and email telling you the time, duration, and magnitude of voltage fluctuations. Some operations on the utility grid many only last 5 cycles, which is 1/12th of a second. Usually when equipment does trip off it is due to a combination of magnitude and duration. It may ride through a large magnitude fluctuation if it only lasts for a small time. This system does not prevent trips but at least it gives you notice that you may need to go reset the controls. It may also give you an indication of how deep and how long the fluctuations are before your equipment trips.

Build a cheap 60 Hz notch filter, and feed it to a scope. Set the scope's trigger level so that it WON"T trigger when the voltage is correct, but WILL trigger when any drop out or frequency change occurs (the transient caused by a drop out will create a transient that will get throuigh the filter).

The scope will trigger and display the transient. Many scopes can "Ding" on trigger, save to file, and even email you.

Try this link. I don't think you want to use battery operated equipment for this purpose. How will you know when the battery died?

It sounds like you have some self latching circuits that barely stay closed and then open up as soon as there is a little trouble (brown-out). You can make simple changes to tolerate longer periods of power outages depending on whether your system is controlled by an AC or DC control circuit. Buying a UPS is major overkill unless it is a case of simple is better.

U need to incoporate a seperate overvoltage and undervoltage relay to the cct to monitor above transient voltages(fluctuations).U will connect both indicator lamps and audio alarm to the control terminals of the above relay.This will enable u to be alerted in the night when an equipment fails and also the lamps will let u know if the problem is overvoltage or undervoltage.

U may use a good UPS either for only the particular equipment affected or the whole equipment if u can afford the cost.

I would also advise that u reset yr protection relays or breakers to hold for a longer period.

Patrick Whowha

I would like to thank everybody for their views/suggestions. I now have a clear idea on how to solve this problem.

My system works on single phase 220 Volt system. Due to minor volatage fluctuation lasting even a fraction of second or one second trips my system. Sometimes it is ignored which can lead to a major problem.

Again, Thanks everybody for their suggestions.