HARMONICS ESTIMATION IN STRESSED ELECTRIC
POWER NETWORKS
P.K.Dash, A. K. Pradhan, G . Panda, R. K. Jena
Abstract- The paper presents an integrated
approach for the estimation of harmonic
components of a power network in the
presence of frequency changes based on the
use of Fourier linear combiner (FLC) and
extended complex Kalman filter (ECKF). The
ECKF estimates the accurate frequency of the
signal to update the nominal frequency of the
input vector to the FLC. The FLC tracks the
Fourier coefficients of the signal data corrupted
with noise very accurately. Once signal is
modeled properly, the time varying harmonics
of a power system can be estimated accurately
I using this new approach. Several numerical
tests have been conducted to highlight the
effectiveness of the technique even in the
presence of frequency jump, amplitude
variations, noise etc. Also the approach is
tested with data obtained from a power
network in the laboratory environment.
I. INTRODUCTION
An increasing number of high voltage
transmission systems have static VAR
compensators placed at strategic locations
which can inject time varying harmonics to the
systems. The advent of FACTS devices
suggests their use in future power transmission
and distribution systems. This gives rise to the
possibility of generation of nonstationary
harmonic voltages and currents in the power
system. Moreover, despite the amount of
harmonic filtering they usually have, HVDC
systems can still generate current and voltage
harmonics at meaningful levels, under
constraining operating conditions.
P.K.Dash is with the Multimedia
University,Malaysia,e-mail:
I pradiDta.dash~,mmu.edu.my
A.K.Pradhan is with the University
College of Engineering, Burla, India.
G.Panda, R.K.Jena are with the Regional
Engineering College, Rourkela, India.
0-7803-7233-6/01/$10.00 02001 IEEE.
The series compensation can also
produce low frequency oscillations that interact
with SVCs to produce amplitude-modulated
harmonics. The increasing electronic loads in
the power systems result in more harmonic
pollution. Several disturbances further
complicate this phenomenon by modulating the
fundamental frequency, which ultimately
yields harmonics with changing amplitudes and
frequency.
Thus accurate measurement of
harmonic levels is essential for designing
harmonic filters, monitoring the stress to which
the power system devices are subjected due to
harmonics and specifying digital filtering
techniques for phasor measurements for
relaying. Several numerical techniques have
been presented for the estimation of power
system harmonics and some of them include
Discrete Fourier and Fast Fourier Transforms,
Spectral observer, Hartley transform, Kalman
filtering, Neural Networks [I-81, etc. As in
nonstationary harmonics, both frequency and
amplitudes are time varying; most of the above
formulations yield inaccurate estimates and the
estimation error could be as high as 10% in the
presence of random noise and fimdamental
frequency deviation.
Amongst the techniques researched in
this area, the Kalman filter [7] and the Fourier
linear combiner [9] are very effective means
for on-line tracking of power system
harmonics. It is well known that the Kalman
filter produces accurate estimates of the
amplitude variation and phase jumps when the
fundamental frequency is fixed. During
frequency changes it can not automatically
retune itself to the new incoming frequency. In
a similar way it is seen that the Fourier linear
combiner using a single layer neural network
can produce accurate harmonic estimates, if the
incoming frequency is stationary. During
frequency changes the accurate tracking time
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becomes much larger and the errors creep into
the estimation.
The authors, therefore, propose a
hybrid combination of a Kalman filter and
Fourier linear combiner for time varying
harmonics in the presence of frequency
changes. The Kalman filter is of an extended
complex type (ECKF) proposed in
[lo] that has the capability of modeling the
frequency as a state vector and the Fourier
linear combiner comprises a single layer neural
network [IO]. Once the frequency is estimated
accurately by the ECKF, the FLC computes the
time varying amplitudes and phase jumps of
the stressed power system signal accurately
within a shorter time window of 1 to 2 cycles.
Further the FLC is easy to implement in real
time in comparison to the fixed frequency
Kalman filter as it involves large
computational overhead.
11. PROBLEM FORMULATION
It is reported in [ 101 that the FLC can be
used for harmonic estimation when the
hndamental frequency is fixed. Although the
analyzer can track time variations, its
capability in this respect is restricted to
amplitude variations and phase jumps. During
frequency changes, it will fail because it can
not autoniatically retune itself to the new
frequency. Therefore a scheme as shown in
Fig. 1 is proposed where the actual system
frequency is fed to the FLC with an ECKF
based frequency estimator.
A. Amplitude Estimation
As shown in Fig. 2, the collective
hndamental components Vi (t) and harmonic
amplitudes (Vz(t),..., V,(t)) can be estimated
using an adaptive FLC algorithm [lo]. This
algorithm, however, suffers from poor
convergence in the presence of noise and
harmonics and hence a new LMS weight
updating technique is presented below to speed
up the convergence to the true value and
simultaneously exhibit a strong noise rejection
property.
The discrete form of power system voltage
waveform is
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N
V ( k )= 1vi cos(n&T + &) + q ( k ) (1)
i=l
In equation (1) q ( k ) is a zero mean
random noise, N is the highest order of the
harmonic in the signal, o is the fundamental
angular velocity ( o = 2MPfr = frequency) and
obtained from the ECKF, vi is the magnitude
of the ith harmonic and 4, its phase angle and
AT= sampling interval, k being the time step.
The voltage signal (1) can be expressed as
W )= s(k) + 17 (4
N
= (ai cos iwkAT + bi sin iwkAT)+
i=l
17 (4 (2)
The parameters a, and b,of the
signal convpted by noise 17 (k) are obtained by
minimizing the error e(k) between the desired
signal V(k)and the estimated signal f (k)by a
weight adjustment algorithm.
B. Frequency Estimation
Power system frequency can be
accurately estimated by the ECKF [lo]. In the
state space formulation, let xi, x2 and x3
represent the following:
In this model, the state vector x l @ ) is
dependent on system frequency, which may be
unknown. The observed signal Y@) is obtained
as
Y ( k ) = v,cos(kwhT + $1)
= d k ) + xz(k)xj2(k) (4)
The stochastic version of the signal model in
(1) is obtained in a difference equation form in
the state space as
The observation vector according to the EKF
principle is obtained as
(5)
Since equation ( 5 ) represents a
nonlinear recursive filter, the ECKF technique
 is applied to obtain the states in the following
manner :
i ( k + l / k ) =f ( i ( k l k ) )
(6)
where f stands for a function and the index
stands for the estimated value. The frequency
is estimated for estimated states as
(7)
where Im stands for the imaginary part of a
quantity and f, represents for the estimated
frequency.
111. SIMULATION RESULTS
To evaluate the performance of the
proposed scheme in estimating amplitudes of
harmonics numerical experiments implemented
in MATLAB have been performed. The a-
phase signal is utilized by the ECKF to
estimate the frequency and the FLC uses the
same for amplitude and phase calculations of
. fundamental and harmonic components. A
sampling rate of 64 samples per cycle (50 Hz
system) is considered in the calculations.
Effect of frequency change on
estimation
A sample signal of the type
v(t)=l. Osin(wt+d6) +O. 3sin(3 wt+61c/7) +
0. I5sin(5wt+ d 3 )
+O. Isin(7wt+n/l8)+O.O5sin(l I w t + d 8 )
is considered for the purpose.
Earlier fixed frequency FLC [IO]
estimation algorithm was effected for any
frequency drift. A frequency jump up
phenomenon is considered where the system
frequency at 50Hz suddenly goes up to 52 Hz
at 0.19sec. It is observed that the estimation of
higher harmonics takes more time to converge
to the true value as shown in fig.3. The
frequency tracking by the ECKF is also shown
in Fig. 3f. The accuracy of the estimated signal
component is found to be significantly better
than the only obtained by using the normally
available Kalman filter algorithm. The
estimated frequency, however, converges to the
reference value in almost one cycle based on
the fundamental frequency of the signal.
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IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
The proposed hybrid estimator is
encoded in the form of a software package in
the Pentium-111, 500 MHz computer system. A
laboratory power supply system (230 volts,
5Ocls) shown in Fig.4 is considered for the
collection of data samples through PCL-208
data acquisition card using 12-bit successive
approximation technique for A/D conversion.
The card provides a powerful easy to use
software driver routine written in C" language.
A sampling rate of 1.0 kHz is chosen for data
acquisition in this case. The estimation results
are shown in Fig. 5 .
The power supply system contains traces
of third and fifth harmonic components which
are varying with time. The amplitudes of the
harmonic components are comparatively very
small with regard to the fundamental. The
figure shows the amplitudes of the
fundamental, third, fifth harmonic components
along with the frequency and the actual supply
voltage waveform. The variations in the
amplitudes of the fundamental and harmonic
components shown in the figure are due to the
changing power network operating condition.
The laboratory power system bus voltage is
time varying as the supply is brought from a
500 kVA distribution transformer through
feeder. The waveforms also contain the traces
of random noise picked up during signal data
acquisition.The next part of the laboratory
experiment comprises in showing the effect of
frequency change of the estimated signal. A
signal generator is used to generate frequency
jumps in the signal and has inherent noise
mixed into the signal. The signal sampling rate
is kept at 1 kHz as before and Fig.6 shows the
effect of frequency jumps on the estimated
amplitudes of fundamental and harmonic
components. From the figure it is seen that the
estimator works very well and tracks the time
varying quantities quickly and accurately. Also
it is found that the amplitudes of the
fundamental component and its frequency are
tracked down accurately. On the other hand
the 31d and 5Ih harmonic components show
rapid fluctuations and this is due to the addition
of noise whose amplitude is comparable to the
magnitudes of the harmonic components.
V. CONCLUSIONS
The paper presents a new approach for
adaptive estimation of harmonic amplitudes in
 a power system network. The technique is
based on the hybrid combination of FLC and
ECKF to track the time varying amplitudes
accurately at different frequencies. The FLC
comprises a single layer neural network whose
weights are updated by an adaptive emor
adjustment technique to provide faster
convergence and noise rejection. Th extended
complex Kalman filter is able to model the
frequency as a state and results in a significant
reduction in computation time and superior
accuracy. The hybrid combination is capable of
estimating both the frequency and amplitude of
a varying signal with changing harmonic
pattern and sudden frequency jumps. The noise
rejection property of the proposed method is
superbly illustrated for several case studies
presented in the paper. Real-time
implementation in a laboratory environment
has clearly demonstrated the simplicity and
efficiency of the method.
VI. REFERENCES
[ I ] J. W. Cooley, and J. W. Tukey,”Analgotjthm
for machine calculation of complex
Fourier series”, J. Math. Comput., Vol.
19,1965, pp. 297-301.
[2] D.H. Hostetter, “Fourier analysis using
spectral observers”, Proc. IEEE, Vol. 68,
1980, pp. 284-285
[3] G.H.Hostetter, “Recursive discrete Fourier
Transform”, IEEE Trans. on ASSP, Vo1.28,
1980,pp.
[4] K. Osejniczak,and G.Heydt, “Basic mecha-
nisms of generation and flow of harmonic
signals in balanced and unbalanced three-
phase power systems”, IEEE WM,1989.
[SI G.T. Heydt, D.J. Kish, F. Holcomb, and Y.
Hill, “A methodology for assessment of
harmonic impact and compliance with
standards for distribution systems”, IEEE
Trans. on Power Delivery, Vol. 6, No. 4,
1991, pp. 1748-1754.
[6] P.K. Dash, and A.M. Sharaf, “A Kalman
filtering approach for estimation of power
system harmonics”, Proc. 3rdInt. Conf. on
Harmonics in Poewr Systems, Nashville,
Indiana, Sept. 28-Oct. 1, 1988, pp. 34-40.
[7] A.A. Girgis, W.B. Chang, and E.B.
Makram, “A digital measurement scheme
for on-line tracking of power system
785
harmonics”, IEEE Trans. on Power
Delivery, Vol. 6, N0.3, 1991, pp.1153-
1 160.
[SI S.Osowski, “Neural network for Estimation
of Harmonics components in a Power
System”, IEE Proc. Part-C., Vol. 139,
N0.2, 1992, PP. 129-135.
[9] P. K. Dash, D. P. Swain, A.Routray, and
AC.Liew, “ Harmonic Estimation in a
Power System using Adaptive
Perceptrons”, IEE Proc. Part-c, Vol. 143, 0 .
6, 1996, pp.565-574.
[IO] P. K. Dash, A. K. Pradhan, and G. Panda, “
Frequency estimation of distorted Power
System signals using extended complex
Kalman Filter”, IEEE Transactions on
power Delivery, Vol. 14, No.3, 1999,
pp.761 -769.
Biographies
P.K.Dash was a Professor of Electrical
Engineering and the Chairman, Centre for
Intelligent Systems, Regional Engineering
College, Rourkela, India. Presently he is a
Professor in the Faculty of Engineering,
Multimedia University, Malaysia
D.K.Sahoo is a research scholar in the Centre for
Intelligent Systems, Regional Engineering
College, Rourkela, India
B.K.Panigrahi is a lecturer in the Department of
Electrical Engineering, University College of
Engineering, Burla. Currently he is pursuing
Ph.D. work in Power Quality area.
G. Panda is a Professor and Head Department
of Applied Electronics and Instrumentation
Engineering, Regional Engineering College,
Rourkela, India.
 Fourier

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Fig. 1 . The proposed harmonic estimator

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Fig. 2. Fourier linear combiner to estimate fundamental

and harmonic components

Data Acquisition Pentium-III

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Fig.4 Experimental Set- up

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