Design and Development of an IoT Based Real-Time Virtual Smart Energy Meter using Labview

Worldwide energy demand is increasing exponentially. Thus, the need to measure it becomes inevitable to reduce the energy wastage. To that end, proper metering infrastructure is required. This research work proposes the designing and implementation of virtual smart energy meters using LABVIEW to monitor the power and energy consumed by the consumer. In this work, two virtual energy meters have been developed. One is a simulation-based virtual smart energy meter considering two fans, two ACs, eight lights, and one projector as loads. The other is an IoT-controlled real-time virtual smart energy meter. For remote control of physical loads, an IoT-controlled real-time smart energy meter has been proposed by the authors using the BLYNK IoT platform. For data acquisition two current sensors (ACS712), two voltage sensors (ZMPT101B) and an acquisition card (NI USB-6008 ) have been used. For manual control of the load two manual switches and automatic control, one relay module (4 channels) has been considered. For real-time load, two incandescent lamps 100W each are used in this work. The real-time power calculations using the developed virtual smart energy meter have been compared with actual power measured using a hardwired digital energy meter and the results have been in close agreement with those of the digital energy meter with an accuracy of 4% which is within acceptable limits as per IEEE standards.