A solar-powered wireless data acquisition system for monitoring electrical substations

-This paper describes a wireless data acquisition system for monitoring electrical substations. The proposed system consists of a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN – IEEE 802.11b/g) transmitter module equipped with a data acquisition system, having current and voltage sensors, a solar power supply with battery energy storage, and a receiver module connected to a remote controller for data processing. The system can be used to continuously monitor a variety of plant within the substation and has low power consumption with inbuilt overvoltage protection. A prototype has been built, and validation tests have been used to check its performance for monitoring of the leakage current of a distribution surge arrester and an insulator. The measured results are in close agreement with those recorded directly through a Data Acquisition (DAQ) card with fibre-optic and coaxial cable connected systems. The operation of this wireless system has been tested and proven resilient under high-frequency interference signals such as those generated by corona and surface discharges. Key-Words: Wireless communication, Data acquisition, Monitoring, High-Voltage Substation, Solar panel, transmitter, receiver, leakage current, transducer, microcontroller