The Design Of Concentrator For Remote Low Voltage Electricity Colleting System

In recent years, the concept of smart grid which driven by the awareness of theimportance on green energy and energy saving has been brought up and turning into theinevitable trend of future power grid development. However, a very important part ofbuilding up a solid smart gird system is to design an electric consuming informationacquisition system which bearing the essential responsibility including: automaticallycollecting, sharing and real-time monitoring on electric consuming information. Especiallyfor the residential information acquisition system which developed from low-voltagecentralized meter reading system, lots of efforts need to be made on promoting it as it hashuge impact on the living quality of citizens. The concentrator which operated as thebridge between the master and collector (smart meters) stands as a leading role in thewhole acquisition system which will determine the function adaptability of the wholesystem.The paper illustrates the development of smart meters reading system both home andabroad. According to standards and protocols of the latest version of <Power user electricenergy data acquisition system> for residential users, the paper designed the concentratorin the collection system by adopting multiple communication method including: GPRS asuplink communication and the combination carrier and RS-485communication asdownward communication. After analyzing the principle and the required function of theconcentrator, it will illustrate the design for the hardware and software of the systemaccording to the development process and structure of the embedded system. Theconcentrator adopts high performance S3C2440of ARM9series as the main control chip.By utilizing the rich peripherals of the chip, it can expand various communication methodincluding remote GRPS, Ethernet, infrared, RS-485bus and low-voltage power linecarrier to achieve well performance of data collection of concentrator in multiple methods;the designed application software operates under the embedded and real-time monitoringWin CE software platform. It uses multitasking mechanism to realize the functions such asGPRS communication, and protocol conversion. In addition, the common update method need to transmit all the application file. It leads to a large number of data, low updatespeed and so on. In order to avoid this problem, the paper has proposed module updatingmethod for concentrator which does not need to transmission the entire applicationdocuments. It is a significant progress as it makes a convenient path for updating andadding new function to the acquisition terminal. At last, related tests for the concentratorare carried on and the performance and function are testified by the data.