A MEAN stack based remote monitoring system for electrical distribution feeders in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Urban electrical distribution networks are mostly comprised of Medium Voltage (MV) ring distribution feeders to improve reliability. Transformers connected to MV feeders transfer power from MV network to Low Voltage (LV) distribution networks. In underground LV distribution networks, feeder pillars are used to branch out LV feeders emerging from distribution transformers. Currently, the existing distribution systems have several issues that affect reliability and power quality. This paper proposes a low-cost distribution monitoring system developed using low-cost hardware and a MEAN (MongoDB, Express.js, AngularJS, Node.js) software stack, which cater to requirements of Sri Lankan distribution utilities. Monitoring units that can be installed on LV feeder pillars are used to monitor LV electrical parameters and the condition of fuses of the feeder pillar. Data acquired from monitoring units are periodically transmitted to a remote TCP server using GPRS and then used to estimate power parameters of MV network, to detect faults, monitor trends and calculate system reliability parameters. The TCP server records all collected data in a database. A HTTP server is used to provide a user interface that can be used to view recorded data and processed information on a web-based interface.