A Novel Wireless Multifunctional Electronic Current Transformer Based on ZigBee-Based Communication

Overhead and underground power line monitoring is an essential infrastructure for advanced operation in the smart grid. Wireless sensor networks are attractive to remote power line monitoring, due to their rare geography restrictions, simple engineering design, and flexible equipment expansion. Considering the ZigBee’s characteristic of low transmission rate, almost commercial sensors adopt the high-speed communication, such as Cellular and WiFi, to implement the real-time wireless monitoring. However, among all wireless technologies, ZigBee, characterizing high security, ultra-low power consumption, reliable network, low cost, and ease of design, is widely used in many industries. This paper proposes a new ZigBee-based communication for multifunctional electronic current transformers (ECTs), which are used in overhead and underground line monitoring. To tackle ZigBee’s low transmission rate, the proposed method involving a transmission strategy can make the ZigBee-based communication satisfy both measurable and protective purposes of multifunctional ECTs. Finally, the new ZigBee-based wireless communication is implemented and integrated with an ECT, which is based on the coreless Hall-effect current transformer (HCT), and the proposed ZigBee-based wireless multifunctional HCT is called ZiHCT. The measurement results show that the ZiHCT can achieve accuracy not only to Class 0.5 for measuring CTs, but also to Class 5P20 for protective CTs according to IEC standard 60044-8.