Transcript
Hello, everyone. Welcome to today’s Ask a Pro session. I’m Scott Windsor, the lead software engineer at PMI, and I’m joined today by our president, Chris Mullins. Today, we’re gonna be talking more about power quality focus areas with Merlin.
In this presentation, we’re gonna cover what are some of the power quality focus areas, how Merlin can help with your analysis, and navigating the results of a Merlin analysis to easily find the focus area information that you’re after. And as we go, if you have any comments or questions, just type them in the chat and we’ll go through them at the end.
Power Quality Focus Areas
The power quality focus areas that Merlin will address are flicker, harmonics, voltage sags, and voltage swells.
Flicker
The flicker focus area quantifies the severity and frequency of flicker events, compares them against established planning or compatibility limits, and ties them back to operating conditions like load cycling or switching operations. This gives insight into whether flicker is likely to drive customer complaints or process disturbances and to prioritize corrective actions where they’ll have the biggest impact.
Harmonics
The harmonics focus area analyzes waveform distortion through harmonic spectrum and total demand or voltage distortion, identifies when distortion levels may reduce equipment life, increase losses, interfere with protection or communication systems, or violate planning limits at key nodes, and it characterizes dominant harmonic orders and how they vary within load conditions.
This category will give us insight into potential impacts on equipment reliability, system performance, and helps prioritize targeted mitigation, especially in coordination with customers who have significant nonlinear loads.
Voltage Sags
The voltage sags focus area characterizes short duration reductions in RMS voltage magnitude typically driven by faults, motor starting, or large step changes in load, quantifies the depth, duration, and frequency of these events, and compares them against the sensitivity of connected equipment or industry benchmarks.
This gives insight into links between sag performance and issues like nuisance trips, process upsets, or equipment mis-operation, and helps evaluate whether system performance is typical, marginal, or problematic for the specific application.
Voltage Swells
The voltage swells focus area characterizes short duration increases in RMS voltage magnitude above nominal, often associated with system faults, switching actions, or sudden load rejection, and it quantifies the magnitude, duration, and incidents of these events and relates them to system configuration and operating events.
This will give us insight into the potential for swells to stress insulation, trigger surge protection, or disrupt sensitive loads, and helps identify locations or conditions where overvoltage risks should be reduced or monitored more closely.
How Merlin Can Help
Merlin delivers a detailed disturbance-focused overview across several critical power quality areas, taking what used to be hours of manual review and turning it into clear, actionable insights in record time. When you run a recording through Merlin, it provides targeted insight for each of these key focus areas.
For every focus area, you’ll get a concise executive summary that gives you the big picture at a glance, and you’ll get highlights and details for any high severity issues that Merlin has identified. This boosts your data’s signal to noise ratio and lets you jump straight in to dealing with the big issues.
This means you can quickly zero in on the most critical problems without having to comb through the entire recording yourself. Merlin does the heavy lifting, highlighting what matters most to you so you can focus on interpretation and solutions.
Focus Area Report Sections
Each of the focus area reports will have additional subsections in addition to the executive summary and the high severity issues. Not all may be present, but likely they all will. It depends upon what data’s recorded, if certain issues exist or not. To summarize the sections, let’s step through them real quick.
- Executive Summary and High Severity Issues: As discussed above.
- Compliance Summary: Each focus area report has one or more compliance standards that were assessed and reports how compliant the data was in the recording in relation to those standards. Sometimes the data needed for a particular compliance assessment might not have been recorded, which will prevent Merlin from properly assessing compliance against that standard. If that is the case, it will be noted.
- Customer Versus Utility Attribution: This section evaluates whether observed power quality issues are more consistent with customer-side behavior or utility-side conditions. In addition to the attribution analysis, it also summarizes attribution confidence so engineers understand where responsibility is clear and where additional data or coordination may be needed.
- Summary of Focus Area Evidence: This section consolidates the most important measurements, events, and statistical indicators that support the conclusions for the focus area. It highlights representative examples from strip charts, waveforms, and event logs, along with any relevant compliance metrics to show how the report moved from raw data to specific findings. The goal of this section is to give engineers a concise but traceable evidence trail that they can revisit if deeper review or independent verification is required.
- Patterns and Likely Origins: This section describes recurring patterns in the data such as time and day trends, phase-specific behavior, or correlations with load changes in system operations. It uses those patterns to narrow down plausible origins for the power quality issues, pointing to likely equipment classes, locations in the system, or operating conditions that align with the observed signatures. Where multiple explanations remain possible, it will note the leading candidates and the evidence supporting or limiting each one.
- Overall Investigation Guidance: This section connects the focus area findings to the broader PQ investigation and highlights how the identified issues relate to the reported symptoms and system performance. It’ll help direct engineers towards the most relevant time periods, phases, and equipment, and notes where results from different focus areas reinforce or contradict each other.
- Next Steps for Focus Area Examination: That section outlines recommended follow-up analysis steps within the same focus area, such as reviewing specific events, zooming into critical time intervals, or comparing behavior across phases and load conditions. It helps engineers prioritize which data segments and correlations to examine in detail to validate findings and refine root cause hypotheses.
- Advice for Follow-Up PQ Recordings: This section provides guidance on how future PQ recordings can be configured to strengthen conclusions in the focus area, such as extending monitoring duration, adjusting trigger settings, or adding complementary measurement points. It aims to improve data completeness, attribution confidence, and the ability to track whether any corrective actions have improved power quality over time.
Navigating Focus Areas in PQ Canvass
Here is a Merlin analysis report that has been previously run, and the subject of today, the focus areas, is this section down here in the bottom left. You can see we have our flicker, harmonics, sags, and swells. We also have the compliance up in this top right, and that would have fed into these focus areas. In addition, all of the other sections feed into each other to help provide complete analysis.
Clearly, there’s some issues with voltage regulation in this recording, voltage swells specifically, so we’re gonna click on that focus area.
Deeper Analysis with Focus Reports
The key with these focus reports is that they are a more detailed breakdown of the overall Merlin PQ digest. If you go to the main report, that has sections for each of those focus areas, so it has sections for flicker and harmonics and voltage regulation and sags, and that’s derived from the individual focus reports, but the focus reports generally have more detail.
In some cases, like Scott said, you don’t need that detail and the main report is all you might need, but if you need to dig deeper, the next place to go is the focus areas depending on what you’re focused on, and that’s where you’re gonna find the more detailed information. You’ll find more information on attribution, some more regions of interest where it’s identified what the key graph sections are that back up what it’s saying.
You can even go even deeper into the individual raw strip charts. Here’s where you’re going even deeper. This is the section in Merlin that was actually kind of hands-on with the data itself, if you want to see in even more detail what it’s talking about and why, so this is where you’re gonna see the proof.
And of course, then you can always go to the recording yourself and look at it the old-fashioned way where you’re looking at the data yourself. So if you’re digging deeper, you’d start with the high-level report and then work your way through the focus areas and then into the individual strip chart or waveform sections to get even closer to the data and then all the way down to the data itself. That’s kind of the hierarchy of level of detail, working your way from a high-level standpoint all the way down to the raw data.
Again, you don’t always need to go that deep into it, but if you do, that’s the order. And that’s also how Merlin works, where it starts from the ground up and each layer builds on the layers below it.
Upcoming Compliance Report Inspection
Correct me if I’m wrong, Chris, but I believe coming up shortly, we also will have the ability to inspect your compliance reports.
Yes. That’s on the roadmap for early in this quarter. In the power quality report, it has a compliance summary and that’s built from what Merlin has done individually with those different IEEE standards. They’re now behind the scenes, but there’s no way to get to that in the user interface, like Scott said. Here shortly, you’ll be able to dive into those also. So if you need more detail on voltage regulation compliance or flicker per 1453, you’ll be able to see those subsections in Merlin also and see specifically what it did or what it found on each of those sections of IEEE compliance, if you need more detail than what’s already in the power quality report. So look for that coming soon.
The Value of Merlin’s Speed
The thing that impresses me the most is how quickly we get answers looking at our own recordings or recordings customers have sent to us.
Yeah. It would literally take hours to go through all this yourself, to look at every strip chart and compile all this information. Also, to kind of cross-check, at the highest level and the overall power quality report, where it’s putting together different types of power quality information and synthesizing a narrative. That would literally take hours if you did that by hand.
Chat with Merlin
The power quality focus area analysis is highly sophisticated and as you can see, it delivers real tangible value for saving engineers time and working through these complex recordings. As we go on, as we said, like compliance and other things, we’ll be continuing to train, refine, and extend the model, which means its analytical depth and breadth of coverage will only grow stronger over time.
In fact, I think it was last week, we added the ability to chat with Merlin about your recording. How does voltage regulation look in this recording? I suspect it’s gonna not be complimentary if it was a… (laughs)
When you’re chatting with Merlin, Merlin has the entire recording in its memory. So you can ask it about the specific data types, you can kind of brainstorm ideas on mitigation or ask it, “Well, why did you do this? Why did this score that?” Or ask it more detailed questions or brainstorm. “What if we upsized the transformer? What would that do to the voltage sags?” Or give it more information. You could tell it, for example, what the service size or transformer size was or explain what might have happened or you could say, “A cap bank operated around the same time,” that gives Merlin more to think about and helps refine this analysis.
So here’s a great way to kind of bounce ideas off Merlin, ask it more detailed questions about the recording or about the data, and also kind of speculate with it on mitigation or what you could do to help the situation. And this is in beta. The chat will be in production for everyone here shortly.
And this does take a little bit… It’s not an instantaneous conversational experience in the same way maybe if you’ve used ChatGPT or Grok. It’s not coming back to you immediately. Obviously, we have a lot it has to look through.
Questions and Wrap-Up
There’s some handy links I’ll put up here on the screen for everyone, and that includes right here, if you’re interested in checking out Merlin, if you haven’t already, there’s a link right there to our demo site. You can sign up for free, check it out through your normal PQ Canvass account. You can get started for real if it interests you.
Tre Tran has asked, “Can we add Merlin into Guardian?” All of your PQ recordings that you’ve streamed up to PQ Canvass or if you have downloaded your recordings as an NSF, you can upload them to PQ Canvass and Merlin can be used on any of those. If you get your recordings up to PQ Canvass, you’re good to go. And you can use ProVision to transfer any recording up to PQ Canvass.
Yep, you can use ProVision, you can use our iOS PMI View, and you can use our Windows PMI View application on the Windows App Store.
Jean Wallace has also asked, “How long was this demo recording?” So I pulled up the traditional view of a recording we may be used to seeing and you see this was almost a 21-day recording from one of our Eagle 330s.
You can also sign up for the demo of Merlin, if you go to our website on the homepage, there’s a link to click on and sign up for free. You can see what Merlin has done on existing files. I think there’s eight or so already analyzed files in Merlin. So you can look at the data yourself in PQ Canvass and also look to see what Merlin said, to see what the kind of analysis you would get with Merlin.
Well, if anyone does have any more questions, feel free to reach out to us at support@powermonitors.com. Please check out the demo and thanks for hanging out with us today and we’ll see you next time. Have a great rest of your day.
