Design of an Inexpensive Digital Watt-hour Meter

Abstract

An inexpensive digital watt-hour meter has been designed and tested using MCap 7 simulation package since commercially available digital watt-hour meters are very expensive. One of the major usages of watt-hour meters is to measure the power consumption of electricity consumers for billing purposes. Although digital watt-hour meters are commercially available,all electrical power supply companies through out the world including well-developed countries like the United States ofAmerica and the United Kingdom use analogue watt-hour meters to measure the power consumption. This is probably due the expensiveness ofdigital watt-hour meters. The designed digital watt-hour meter consists with analogue multiplier, analogue to digital converters, adder, registers, digital clocks, dividers, accumulators and digital displaying unit. Basically the current and voltage will be multiplied by using a four-quadrant analogue multiplier and then converted to digital signals using analogue to digital converters, which is clocked at a frequency significantly higher than mains frequency, to produce instantaneous values. The algebraic average of the output product per second will be the power consumption per second Finally, this will continuously be added and sent to the digital displaying unit to display watt-hour output. One of the major advantageous of the digital walthour meter is that the power consumption cannot be tampered like in analogue watt-hour meters where the power consumption can be very easily disturbed by changing the rotation power ofthe rotating disk.