TIDUEM7A April 2019 – February 2021
One technique used to tamper with the meter is to remove the neutral connection. If the neutral is disconnected, the RMS voltage and active power cannot be measured. In addition, the main AC/DC power supply is not functional so a backup power supply, such as a battery, must be used to power the meter. For this tamper technique, although the active power reading may be 0 W from not being able to measure voltage, there is still current flowing through the line wire. The presence of this line current can be used to distinguish a power outage event from someone removing the neutral connection of the meter.
The ADS131M04 device has a current-detection mode that can be used to detect the presence of this current for this tamper scenario without drawing too much current so that the lifetime of the backup battery is not significantly affected. In this mode, the ADS131M04 device collects a configurable number of samples at 2.7 kSPS using an internal oscillator and then the absolute value of the results are compared to a programmable threshold. If a configurable number of the samples within a sample window exceed a threshold, the host MCU is notified. If the ADS131M04 device is put in current-detection mode after the system detects an AC supply failure(either due to an outage or removing the neutral connection) and an interrupt is provided from the ADS131M04 device to the MCU by asserting its DRDY pin low, this can indicate that someone has tried to tamper with a meter by removing its neutral connections. Instead of only sensing tamper current on the line from the removal of the neutral, the ADS131M04 device can also be set to simultaneously detect the removal of the line connection by performing current detection on the neutral current channel.