Measurement tools are increasingly used to gauge the performance

Tag : power measuring tool
"It's about understanding where you are," said Joel Shapiro, groupmanager for industrial measurement and control with NationalInstruments' Green Engineering Group. "Measurement is a fundamentalpiece of green engineering."
Shapiro and others in the electronics industry argue that it willbe technology, not government, that solves the world's energyproblems.
Smaller companies, too, have targeted the measurement market. Oneapproach is tracking the efficiency of often-expensive alternativeenergy systems like solar photovoltaics.
Solar Energy Technologies, a small operator out of Circle Pines,Minn., pitched its "EnergyTraker" system at the Midwest RenewableEnergy Association's energy fair in June. Company executive JohnAlexander said the system is designed to squeeze as muchelectricity as possible from solar photovoltaic systems bymeasuring parameters such as daily energy production, ac and dccurrent and voltage, dc amps and watts generated by multiple solararrays, and even daily reduction in greenhouse gases.
The company is initially targeting businesses, but Anderson showedup at the energy fair in neighboring Wisconsin to promoteEnergyTraker for residential use.
Measuring embedded
The ubiquity of embedded processors is another key measurementmarket segment. In the auto industry, for instance, measurementtools are increasingly used to gauge the performance of embeddedcontrollers in order to optimize fuel efficiency.
The collection of measurement data also enables the design of moreenergy-efficient products, said National Instruments' Shapiro. Thecompany, based in Austin, Texas, is promoting these "fix-it"designs for applications beyond automotive that include reducingenergy consumption in everything from specialty steel mills thatrecycle steel to tracking mercury emissions at coal-fired powerplants.
"Measurements are included in the control algorithms or designs[for these systems] in real time," Shapiro said. These real-timemeasurements can then be used to update algorithms on-the-fly sothat, for example, "sampling rates [in a power plant smoke stack]are constantly adjusted to remain in proportion to the stack flow,"Shapiro said.
The monitoring of mercury emissions has become a priority forutilities seeking to avoid paying environmental penalties assessedunder new government air-pollution standards.
On the supply side, National Instruments has also applied itsmeasurement technologies to evaluating the status on the electricalgrid of wind farms, a growing source of alternative energy thatfrequently must be transmitted long distances along the power grid.Measurement systems help integrate wind farms into the power gridand "ride through" faulty sections so that wind turbines can remainonline even when parts of the electrical grid go down during peakdemand or a network failure.