Beckhoff (www.beckhoff.com) has unveiled its latest power monitoring terminal developed to monitor the condition of a three-phase DC or AC mains network.

Suitable for Beckhoff EtherCAT I/O system, the EL3773 power monitoring terminal collects instantaneous values of voltage and power at a remarkably fast sampling rate of up to 10,000 samples per second. This makes the voltage and the power available to the higher-level PC controller for analysis or calculation. Transferring the input channels through oversampling leads to acquisition of actual values with a notably higher resolution, with respect to time, than the communication cycle time.

The EtherCAT Terminal system utilizes the EtherCAT distributed clocks method as its basis to achieve highly accurate acquisition of measured values. The EtherCAT devices are synchronized by the distributed clocks with very high precision. Voltage and current are measured by the EL3773 EtherCAT Terminal through the three channels in every case. Based on the EtherCAT oversampling principle, the six channels are simultaneously measured with up to 100 μs temporal resolution, before they are passed on to the controller. The channel’s maximum sampling frequency is one kHz.

With the supplied data, it is now possible to calculate, with the aid of a PC, true RMS power, values, frequency and power values, including complex user-specific algorithms through the current curves and voltage. The company said that the fast sampling rate also allows the measurement of current peaks and voltage.