An FPGA-based instrument for the estimation of R, L, and C parameters under non sinusoidal conditions

It is well know that the most of today electric and electronic devices frequently work with non sinusoidal waveforms, then, all the passive R, L, and C component, sited in these circuits, are involved with non sinusoidal stimuli. Because of its intrinsic non-linearity, real resistors, inductors, capacitors and so on show behaviors very different from those expected in sinusoidal environment. Consequently, a problem of reliable assessment of these components in presence of non sinusoidal environments arises. This problem is even more critical in applications such as the creation of hybrid filters, control circuits based on patterns of sensing elements, circuits of digital protection in power systems, where the design and control of electrical and electronic circuits depend on the correct modeling of the R, L and C components. In previous researches authors proposed a suitable measurement method for the estimation of R, L and C parameters of passive components in non sinusoidal conditions. This paper deals with the realization of a FPGA-based measurement instrument able to continuously update the estimated values of the considered components. The instrument realization passes through an optimized implementation of the previous-proposed measurement method aimed in minimizing the hardware resources and the computational burden, and increase the measurement rate. After a preliminary tuning of the measurement method, carried out in simulation environment, the hardware and the software architectures of the realized measurement instruments together with the measurement strategy are described, and experimentally characterized