On 06/22/2016 07:39 PM, Michael Galea wrote:
On
06/22/16 16:35, Alvin Starr via talk wrote:
On 06/22/2016 01:25 PM, Jamon Camisso via
talk wrote:
On 2016-06-22 17:46, D. Hugh Redelmeier
via talk wrote:
Remember, he truncated the values
(grep does not round).
My best guess: the average of the readings would be from a
distribution centred on 59.996435 (0.005 larger than Lennart
calculated). It could be as low as 59.991435 or as high as
60.991434,
assuming six digits of precision in the fraction. I know
nothing
about accuracy of the device.
[snip]
No, the device is not a UPS. It is a PLC that measures voltages,
currents, real and reactive power of a 3-phase service. It
provides me the results as IEEE754 32-bit floating point numbers.
It's me that truncates to 2 digits.
The data will be collected with an analogue to digital converter.
There are a number of different A-D converter technologies that can
be used but each technique will affect your accuracy.
It is possible that the A-D converters are 32 bit but more likely
they are somewhere between 8 and 24 bits.
All the A-D converters I know of will give an integer as the result
so the floating point comes from the post processing.
Then there is the sampling frequency.
This will affect the reliability of the frequency if the A-D
conversion is used to calculate the frequency.
So the accuracy of the measuring system needs to be taken into
account when you are using it to measure some other system.
You
know I'm sorry I ever implied that the grid wasn't long term
accurate at 60 Hz! What I should have said was that in the short
term the grid could be quite off 60 Hz but over the longer term it
could average out.
The problem is that the grid needs to be short term synchronized
because if 2 power sources are providing power and they get slightly
out of sync then VERY BAD things happen.
So a 0.01 drift from 60Hz will after 50 cycles be out of phase and
at all the power from 1 source will sucked up by the other source
and the grid will collapse. 50 cycles is just about 1 second of
drift but long before that second elapses the grid would have
collapsed.
The point is that the power sources need to be VERY accurate over
the short term.
So Pickering needs to be exactly in phase with Bruce and with
Niagara and so on.
Over the long term they can slightly adjust their phase to make sure
they are in sync but if the frequency drifts in the short term then
the grid ends up losing power to generator and power-line losses.
That being said any single cycle can be wildly off from 60Hz but
that will be because of local loading or switching transients.
If I really needed to know the answer to the question of "how much
out", I would get ask the PLC to just count cycles and send me the
count with a timestamp. That would tell.
--
Alvin Starr || voice: (905)513-7688
Netvel Inc. || Cell: (416)806-0133
alvin@netvel.net ||