Transcript
Introduction to the Seeker+
Welcome to today’s Ask a Pro session. I’m David Keaton, a firmware engineer here at PMI. Today, we’re gonna take a look at the Seeker+, PMI’s new power quality analyzer designed around a pretty simple idea. When you put an instrument in the field, you shouldn’t have to know in advance exactly what problem you’re gonna find.
With a traditional power quality survey, you typically decide what you wanna measure, how often you wanna measure it, and what thresholds you wanna use before the instrument even starts recording. The problem is that the question you have at the beginning of the survey isn’t always the question you have at the end.
The Seeker+ takes a different approach. You mount it, energize it, and it automatically detects a circuit hookup and begins recording the full set of measurements it supports.
Sampling Speed
One of the biggest differences with the Seeker+ is its sampling speed. Voltage is sampled at one megahertz, which works out to sixteen thousand six hundred and sixty-six samples per cycle on a sixty-hertz system. That matters when we’re dealing with very fast events.
Take a transient caused by something like lightning. An impulse may only last a few microseconds. At a lower sampling rate, you might see one unusual point and know that something has happened, but you don’t necessarily know what. At one megahertz, you can preserve the actual shape of that transient, and that gives you information like the rise time, peak magnitude, and ringing frequency that follows the event, all of which to help identify its source.
Current is sampled at two hundred kilohertz or about three thousand three hundred and thirty-three samples per cycle. That gives us enough detail to look at the current response associated with a voltage event as well.
Input Channels and Range
The Seeker+ has four voltage channels and four current channels. Voltage input covers zero to six hundred volts RMS per phase, and current inputs cover zero to five thousand amps RMS.
An important part of that design is that each input covers its full range. You don’t have to pick a range or clamp setting based on what you think the load is gonna do. That becomes especially useful during longer surveys. If the load changes during the survey, you don’t want to discover at the very end of the survey that you need to go back and change those settings. The idea was to remove as many possible pain points of deploying a recorder in the field. Wanna be able to record anything that may come up or anything that may occur.
GPS, Storage, and Connectivity
The Seeker+ also has GPS support and capability, which allows the records to be timestamped to within one microsecond. If you have two instruments at different locations, different possible survey points, you can determine whether events that were seen on both of those Seeker+recorders were upstream or downstream of where the recording itself took place.
There’s thirty-two gigabytes on the Seeker+ for storing recording data and events. That gives you the ability to store roughly thirty days of information and data, as well as up to two hundred thousand waveform captures.
Those recordings can also be streamed up to PQ Canvass using Wi-Fi or cell, if cell is supported with the Seeker+ that you bought. You can also use our Windows PMI view or iOS PMI view to pull the recordings off over USB, over Wi-Fi or access point.
Deploy Without Configuration
The big idea behind the Seeker+ was the ability to deploy in the field and not have to worry about initializing it beforehand. There’s a few things that you can tune, but you don’t need to. You can just deploy it, and it just records what you need to right out of the box.
You don’t have to worry about setting intervals, only capturing things at one-second intervals or ten-minute intervals. It records at half-cycle RMS.
Aggregation Intervals in PQ Canvass
In PQ Canvass, looking at the Seeker+ recordings, you can see that you can change the aggregation interval for determining the possible events during an analysis. So as you can see here, I’ve got a Seeker+ hooked up to a two-channel input. Now, we have it at ten minutes, which is a typical interval required for certain IEEE standards. You can also go down to one-minute intervals, one second, or half-cycle.
So if you needed to really see exactly what was happening at that current moment in time, you can do so. You don’t have to worry about a specific interval hiding something that happens underneath. Lots of things can happen in between one second to the next, so being able to switch those aggregation intervals at any moment allows you to see not only the big picture, but the minute details as well.
Installation and Power
You don’t need to select measurements when you install and set up a Seeker+. It measures every measurement that it supports right out of the box. The installation is intended to be straightforward. You just connect voltage leads, current probes. Seeker+ detects the circuit hookup, and you don’t need to manually set any of that stuff up.
Draws less than five watts while it’s recording, and there’s a supercapacitor on it that allows it to stay operating up to five minutes if an outage were to occur.
Measurements
While we also measure the typical measurements required of a power quality recorder, such as RMS voltage and current, real reactive apparent power, phase angle, power factor, displacement power factor, cumulative energy measurements, we also measure super harmonics from the two kilohertz to a hundred and fifty kilohertz range. That frequency range is increasingly important for equipment like EV chargers, variable frequency drives, battery inverters.
We also record interharmonics up to the seventeenth harmonic at five hertz spacing. Interharmonics don’t always occur at integer multiples of a fundamental frequency, so they can sit between frequencies that a traditional harmonic analysis is looking at. They can be associated with equipment such as cyclic converters, arc furnaces, and motors operating under a charging load. They can also show up in inverter PV installations.
Voltage sags are additionally captured with half-cycle RMS, makes it possible to compare against ITIC or CBMC curves, see exactly what happened. Transient captures on the device as well use the full one megahertz voltage sampling rate, so you actually get to see the shape of the transient event itself.
The Seeker+ also calculates symmetrical components for both voltage and current. Negative sequence content gives us another way to evaluate unbalance. Also help point towards neutral or ground path issues. Half-cycle RMS gives us ability to visualize events and changes that normal one-second or one-minute intervals would easily hide.
Spectrogram Visualization
With the supraharmonics, we have a new way of visualizing that, which I’ll briefly show. The spectrogram is a new way to visualize that data. Frequency is on one axis, which is the Y-axis here. The X-axis is time, and the magnitude is shown by intensity of color, as can be seen on the right-hand side here.
Things like equipment turning on and off. You can see the bands of harmonics or supraharmonics, interharmonics, illuminating when it comes on and de-illuminating when it goes off again.
Merlin AI Assistant
Once the recording is complete, there’s also Merlin, the AI assistant in PQ Canvass. Merlin can review a completed recording and write up the disturbances it finds, ranking it by severity. Things it could cover are things like flicker, harmonics, voltage sags, and voltage swells.
Merlin Chat also allows you to ask technical questions about the recording itself, and it can also help draft customer-facing documents or letters that you need to make at the end of an investigation.
Summary
The Seeker+, you don’t have to worry about any pre-installation configuration, such as current ranges or recording intervals. Leaves you with a complete measurement set recorded at intervals required by the applicable standards. The half-cycle information underneath, so you can see the minute details, and high-speed waveform and transient data is also available as well, so that way you can probe a little bit deeper into the analysis.
If you have any questions, feel free to call us at 800-296-4120 or email us at support@powermonitors.com. Thank you for joining us today, and have a great rest of your day.