Comparative analysis of power variables in high performance embedded and x86 architectures using GNU/Linux

In this work a comparative analysis of typical power variables is made using several hardware architectures and GNU/Linux software. Voltage and current data are simulated for an industrial device, comparing the performance of x86 and ARM in order to demonstrate the technical feasibility of using embedded hardware to manage high volumes of interesting data in the study of power quality systems. Voltage, current, active power, reactive power and harmonic distortion (both voltage and current) were obtained with simulated data provided by MATLAB and using Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) implementations like Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and libraries like FFTW and KISS FFT. All the software used in our work was open source, running Linux behind them. Results show the feasibility of using high performance embedded systems to develop advanced tasks in analyzing power signals. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.