Design of a Cost Effective Optimized Power Factor Measurement Device for Nonlinear Single Phase Home Appliances

Optimized sampling technique to capture the harmonic distortion is the key for power factor measurement of nonlinear loads. Nowadays the power utilities and appliances are fully nonlinear in nature and thus the distortion of harmonics plays an important role and impacts the accuracy of many power factor measurement circuits and instruments. This study provides a cost effective design with a prototype hardware setup with the major components and specifications. Also describes, an optimized computation to calculate the Total Harmonic Distortion based on Discrete Fourier Transform and power quality parameter measuring fundamentals with flowcharts. This prototype is tested for accuracy and consistency and compared the performance with two different commercial equipments with different types of nonlinear home appliances loads with different instances. The results are proved that the prototype is at par with the standard leading commercial equipments, but cheaper by cost wise. This design can be extended further to achieve better cost effective power factor correction.