IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 50, NO.
6, DECEMBER 2003
DSP- and GPS-Based Synchronized Measurement
System of Harmonics in Wide-Area
Distribution System
Hiroyuki Ukai, Member, IEEE, Koichi Nakamura, Member, IEEE, and Nobuyuki Matsui, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract—With the recent progress in power electronics devices,
harmonic pollution in the power system becomes a significant
problem. Therefore, a great deal of attention has been paid to
harmonic regulations and suppression technologies. As the utility
power distribution system becomes broader and more complex,
advanced harmonic measurement and analysis technologies are
required. This paper presents the advanced measurement system
of harmonics in a wide-area distribution system. The proposed
measurement system has the following features. The measurement
unit at each point in the distribution system consists of a digital
signal processor as a high-speed processor and a global positioning
system as a synchronization measurement. These units as termi-
nals at multipoints in the distribution system are connected to the
central monitoring station by the Internet. By using this system,
the harmonic flows in the distribution system are measured and,
hence, harmonic modeling can be realized in real time.
Index Terms—Digital signal processor (DSP), distribution
system, global positioning system (GPS), harmonics, synchronized
measurement system.
I. INTRODUCTION
R ECENT progress in power electronics technologies has
caused a serious problem of harmonic pollution in power
systems. In Japan, as is well known, “the guideline for harmonic
regulations and suppressions” was declared in 1994, and many
measures have been taken to cope with this situation. How-
ever, it is not easy to solve the problem because the suppression
technologies are related to many factors, for example, power
capacity, harmonic characteristics, network configuration, and
cost performance. Moreover, due to the recent easing of re-
strictions on electric utilities in Japan, the participation of in-
dependent power producers (IPPs) increasingly makes distribu-
tion systems more complex. Power system harmonics are cat-
egorized as the specific harmonics and the unspecific ones [2].
The former are due to harmonics generated from high-voltage
power demands, thus, the sources of harmonics can be specified,
which are large-capacity diode regulators, cycle converters, and
so on. On the other hand, the later harmonics originate in home
electric products, office automation apparatus, and so on. The
total amount of later harmonics is so large that they cannot be
neglected and also cannot be easily specified. The broader and
Manuscript received July 5, 2002; revised May 30, 2003. Abstract published
on the Internet September 17, 2003. An earlier version of this paper was pre-
sented at the 26th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society,
Nagoya, Japan, October 22–28, 2000.
The authors are with Nagoya Institute of Technology, Nagoya 466-8555,
Japan (e-mail:ukai@elcom.nitech.ac.jp).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIE.2003.819660
0278-0046/03$17.00 © 2003 IEEE
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1159
more complex a distribution system is, the more significant the
harmonic analysis and compensation technologies become.
From these backgrounds the harmonic compensation method
using the passive or the active power filters have received a
great deal of attention [3]–[6]. In the wide-area distribution
system, however, it is the actual situation that the mechanism
of harmonic propagation and the harmonic model are not
necessarily clear [7]. In order to precisely analyze harmonic
phenomena, it is dispensable to construct a high-accuracy
measurement system. Also, each measurement system is
required to have a function which can synchronously measure
harmonics at each point. The phasor measurement unit (PMU)
has been practically introduced for the use of synchronized
measurement keeping the stability of the power system [1]. In
particular, the synchronized phasors over a wide-area power
system are measured to evaluate the stability by using the PMU.
In the present paper, we extend the concept of the PMU to the
harmonic analysis. We propose the advanced monitoring system
of harmonics and the harmonic modeling technique. For this
purpose, in the first step, the high-speed and accurate measure-
ment system for harmonic analysis in a wide-area distribution
system is developed. We use a digital signal processor (DSP) as
the high-speed processor and a global positioning system (GPS)
signal for synchronized measurement. In Section II, the basic
concept of the proposed measurement system is explained. In
Section III, the details of the measurement equipment developed
in this study are presented. In Section IV, the recursive digital
Fourier transform (DFT) algorithm is proposed as the harmonic
analysis method. Finally, some research developments that are
feasible by using the proposed system are commented upon.
II. MEASUREMENT OF HARMONICS AT MULTIPOINTS IN POWER
DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM
In order to analyze harmonics in a wide-area distribution
system, it is necessary to construct the broad area measurement
system which enables us to synchronously measure harmonics
at multipoints. To this end, the real-time synchronized measure-
ment system is proposed. The basic concept is shown in Fig. 1.
The major purposes of this system are as follows: 1) analyzing
the harmonic propagation and 2) continuously monitoring
harmonic information. To measure harmonics propagating at
high speed such a surge voltage, the measurement equipment
provided the data logging with high-speed sampling is required.
Also, harmonics OF at least two distinct points have to be
measured at the same time. On the other hand, by continuously
1160 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 50, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2003

Fig. 1. Broad monitoring system of harmonics.

monitoring harmonic information at the same time and also at

multipoints in the wide-area distribution system, it is possible
to obtain a harmonic model in real time. To this end, harmonic
information at each point has to be concentrated at the central
monitoring station by a communication system.
In Fig. 1, each terminal unit is assigned to each node or a
major power receiving end and has the function of measuring
and processing voltage and current signals in real time. It con-
sists of a GPS for time synchronization, a DSP for real-time
analysis of harmonics, and a communication modem. The mea-
sured or analyzed harmonic data are transferred to the central
monitoring station with the absolute time data. The center mon-
itoring station is comprised of the communication modem and
the high-end processor which analyzes and visualizes harmonic
information from terminal units. The communication measures
connecting the central station and the terminal units are, for
example, the Internet, a dedicated telephone line, optical fiber
cable, personal handyphone system (PHS), and so on.

III. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION Fig. 2. System configuration.

The configuration of the high-speed and high-accuracy syn- TABLE I

chronized measurement of harmonics using the DSP and GPS SPECIFICATION OF ADC
is shown in Fig. 2. The system is an on-board type inserted into
the PCI bus slot of the PC. The board is the long card size with a
length of 312 mm and width of 106.68 mm. The system consists
of four units: the measuring and processing unit (ADC/DAC and
DSP), the main control unit (Host PC), the time-synchroniza-
tion unit (GPS receiver, and the high-resolution interval timer),
and the data-transmission unit. In the following, we explain the
specifications and the features of each unit in detail.

A. Measuring and Signal Processing

The instantaneous values of voltage and current are input to
the A/D converters through the potential transformer (PT) and
the current transformer (CT). In this system, there are four A/D
converters: one is the fast-sampling converter, and the others
are the medium-speed sampling converters with two channels. is required to log harmonic data as quickly as possible. For ex-
The specifications of each converter are shown in Table I. The ample, in order to analyze the propagation of the harmonic wave
fast-sampling ADC is equipped only for data acquisition, which at two distinct points 300 m away from each other, at least 1 s

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UKAI et al.: DSP- AND GPS-BASED SYNCHRONIZED MEASUREMENT SYSTEM OF HARMONICS IN WIDE-AREA DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM 1161

TABLE II
SPECIFICATION OF DSP

is required for the sampling period. For this purpose, 960 kHz Fig. 3. Configuration of HRITG.
is realized as the maximum sampling frequency. On the other
hand, the medium-speed sampling ADCs are equipped to ana- TABLE III
lyze both three-phase voltage and current. Their sampling fre- SPECIFICATION OF VCO
quency is 120 kHz. The fast sampling is made possible by using
the feedback control circuit phase locked to the GPS clock,
which will be explained in the following section. Each A/D con-
verter has an antialiasing low-pass filter, which is designed to
satisfy each measurement purpose stated above. The cutoff fre-
quencies are 1.5 and 15 kHz, respectively.
On the other hand, the sampled data through the ADC
are transferred to the internal RAM of the DSP by the direct
memory access (DMA) interrupt. Several harmonic data are
calculated at the CPU from these sampled data. The specifica-
tions of the DSP used in this system is shown in Table II. The
DSP is well known as a high-speed processor with low cost and
low power consumption, and has the following architecture.
1) The Harvard architecture shares the data bus and the ad-
dress bus. Therefore, the execution of the arithmetic logic
unit (ALU) is done in parallel with the decoding program.
2) Program and data are separately assigned in two internal
2-port RAMs.
3) DMA data transfer is adopted.

B. Time Synchronization Fig. 4. Transient response of frequency error.

The GPS receives a pulse per second (1p/s) from the GPS
satellites synchronizing to the universal time coordinate (UTC)
with high accuracy( 100 500 ns per 1 p/s). The absolute
time information can be obtained from all around the world. By
using the GPS clock as the external sampling clock of the ADC,
the synchronized measurement is realized at multipoints in the
distribution system.
In this paper, the GPS signal is also used to guarantee the
accuracy of the fast sampling of the ADC in the following way.
The accuracy of a commercial crystal-controlled oscillator is
usually about 30 s per second. Since our requirement for the
sampling accuracy is less than 1 s, it leads a large error if we
directly use this oscillator as the sampling timer. Therefore, in
this paper, we developed the high-resolution interval timer using
the GPS clock (HRITG), as shown in Fig. 3. The specifications
of the quarts-crystal oscillator used in this paper are presented
in Table III. The oscillation frequency of this oscillator can be
controlled by the external voltage voltage-controlled oscillator
(VCO).
The error bits between the output frequency from the VCO
and the nominal frequency of the VCO (30.72 MHz) is counted
by the 12 –bit error counter. The least significant bit corresponds
to 1 Hz. The error data are latched at the timing of 1p/s inter-
rupted by the GPS receiver, and then are sent to the DSP for PI
control calculation. In the DSP, the controlled output cor-
responding to the error is calculated by the following equation:
(1)
The controlled output of the PI controller is input to the VCO
through the DAC. The transient response is shown in Fig. 4. As a
result, by choosing the proportional gain and the integral gain
appropriately, we can realize the accuracy of 30.72 MHz
1 Hz( 32.5 ns per second) for 1p/s. Furthermore, this circuit
is compactly constructed by adopting the programmable logic
device (PLD).

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1162
Fig. 5. Data transmission from DSP to PC memory.
C. Data Transmission Between DSP and PC
The harmonics data calculated in the DSP are transferred to
memory in the host PC through the PCI bus. Since the pro-
grams of the DSP and PC are independent each other, in order
to transfer the data of the DSP to the PC, cooperation between
the DSP and PC is necessary. The processes in the DSP are as
follows:
1) calculating for given data;
2) writing into RAM1;
3) flagging when finish writing into RAM1;
4) recalculating for next given data;
5) writing into RAM2;
6) flagging when finished writing into RAM2.
On the other hand, the processes in the PC are as follows:
1) continuing to watch the flag on RAM of DSP;
2) transferring data of RAM1 to RAM on PC after the con-
firmation of finishing writing into RAM1;
3) transferring the data to HDD on PC;
4) continuing to watch the flag on RAM of DSP;
5) transferring data of RAM2 to RAM on PC in confirmation
of finishing writing into RAM2;
6) transferring the data to HDD on PC.
Fig. 5 shows the flowchart of these processes. As described
above, by the flag on the RAM in the DSP, the PC is able to do
parallel processing with the process of the DSP.
D. Main Control Unit (PC)
The roles of the PC as the main control unit are as follows:
1) loading the program for DSP;
2) giving order to start program for DSP;
3) setting the start time of measurement;
4) sending start signal of calculation following the time data
of GPS;
5) saving the result data of DSP into HDD;
6) showing the result data on display.
Fig. 6 shows an instance of a displayed waveform. The kinds
of data shown are instantaneously value, primary, tertiary, 5th,
7th, and 9th harmonic value. The repaint cycle of the display
is about 1 s. Of course, by rewriting the PC program, which
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 50, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2003
Fig. 6. Visualization of harmonics at terminal point.
we developed by using C++ language, it is freely capable of
changing these details.
E. Communication Channel
Each piece of harmonic data is post-processed in the host PC
and/or is transmitted to the central monitoring station through
the communication modem. As the case study, we will recom-
mend the data transmission system by the Internet, which is re-
alized by using JAVA language. JAVA language is widely used
on the World Wide Web (WWW) and has the following charac-
teristics.
1) Safety in operation—Since JAVA has no pointer, there
are no errors in referring the pointer compared with C
language.
2) Multi-sled (parallel processing)—JAVA supports the
multi-sled function which can execute multi processing
at the same time. This facilitates the parallel processing
of the data transmission and the data visualization.
3) Exceptional process—By using this function, the pro-
gram can be resumed without system failure at the un-
expected cutting of network.
4) Interpretive program—On the other hand, the byte-code
file of JAVA is generated for the virtual machine, thus,
execution speed is slower than with a compiling program
like C language.
The network application of JAVA is based on the client-server
model. In our case, the client corresponds to the terminal mea-
surement system and the server the central monitoring station.
Data communication between the client and the server are ex-
ecuted by using stream sockets, where TCP/IP is used as the
communication protocol.
IV. REAL-TIME HARMONIC ANALYSIS USING RECURSIVE DFT
In this section, we explain a computational algorithm to re-
alize the high-speed processing of harmonic data. The algo-
rithm, the recursive DFT, is based upon the DFT, and the re-
cursive form of the algorithm is far more useful for real-time
analysis of harmonics.
UKAI et al.: DSP- AND GPS-BASED SYNCHRONIZED MEASUREMENT SYSTEM OF HARMONICS IN WIDE-AREA DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM
Let be the number of samplings during one cycle. As is
well known, given the time sequence data (
), the th-order DFT spectrum is given by
By using the following expression:
(2) can be rewritten as follows:
Let the th sampled data of the th-order DFT spectrum be
described by
In the same way the ( )th sampled data are described by
Subtracting (5) from (6) leads to the following equation:
By using the following relation:
(7) is rewritten as
This equation yields the recursive relation between
. The basic idea of the recursive DFT is that the in-
stantaneous fluctuation of a harmonic wave form is measured
by moving the window at each sampling period, as shown in
Fig. 7 where (voltage) and .
The spectral value of one harmonic in the computing process
is obtained by only three steps; that is, two subtractions and one
multiplication. Hence, it means that the algorithm is suitable
for a DSP. The recursive DFT algorithm is suitable to analyze
some kind of wave form with constant frequency. DFT or fast
Fourier transform (FFT) usually need number of subsequent
data in computing the spectral values in the frequency domain.
The larger the data number , the more precisely the spectral
values can be analyzed. However, a large number of data needs
a long computing time. On the other hand, the recursive DFT
algorithm requires only one renewal and updated data in com-
puting one spectral value without using number of the subse-
quent data. Therefore, even if the data number becomes large,
the computing time is consequent.
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1163
(2)
(3)
Fig. 7. Recursive DFT algorithm.
(4)
(5)
Fig. 8. Frequency response of DFT.
(6)
Equation (8) is rewritten as
(7) (9)
The spectrum value is computed using both the real part and
imaginary part of (9). However, computation of the square root
takes much time. If the frequency of the wave to be analyzed is
constant, the value of the real part becomes zero when a spec-
trum analysis is begun from the zero crossing. In the usual case,
(8)
since the frequency is almost constant, the value of the real part
can be neglected. By such an approximation, we can make the
and
time of calculation shorter.
Moreover, the gain frequency response of DFT has the char-
acteristics of the comb filter and bandpass filter with width of
33 Hz, as shown in Fig. 8. However, this algorithm is based
on the assumption that the fundamental frequency is constant.
In the practical case, the power frequency is slightly changing.
Therefore, it is necessary to compensate for the error due to the
fluctuation of frequency in order to analyze more exactly [8].
V. CONCLUDING REMARKS
In this present paper, we have proposed the advanced syn-
chronized measurement system of harmonics in wide-area dis-
tribution systems. In this system, a DSP is used as the high-
speed processor and a GPS for time synchronization at multi-
points. Moreover, in order to realize the high-speed sampling,
the HRITG clock is designed. On the basis of these hardware
structures, the recursive DFT is used as the analysis algorithm
of harmonics. This recursive algorithm benefits the real-time
1164 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 50, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2003
computation at the high-speed sampling. By using this system
the analysis of harmonic propagation is possible. At the same
time, by practical measurement in the utility power distribution
systems, harmonic modeling is also possible. In future work,
harmonic analysis and compensation technologies can be de-
veloped by calculation of harmonic power flow and harmonic
impedance.
As mentioned in Section I, power systems have become larger
and more complex. Also, power quality diversifies in correspon-
dence to various power utilities. In order to correspond to such a
new electric energy environment, the management of technolo-
gies of electric energy is required. The harmonic analysis tech-
nology is also one of them. The proposed system in this paper
also enables us to apply various fields of power systems, for ex-
ample, the generator dropping control, the transient analysis, the
adaptive protection relay, and so on [9], [10].
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[10] T. Kani, Y. Ota, H. Ukai, K. Nakamura, M. Aoki, and M. Uehara, “De-
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Hiroyuki Ukai (M’99) received the B.A.Sc., S.M.,
and Ph.D. degrees in engineering from Nagoya In-
stitute of Technology, Nagoya, Japan, in 1977, 1979,
and 1994, respectively.
He is currently an Associate Professor in the
Graduate School of Engineering, Nagoya Institute
of Technology, Nagoya, Japan. His current reaserch
interests include control theory of distributed
parameter systems and control application to power
systems, robotics, and mechanical systems.
Dr. Ukai is a Member of the Institute of Electrical
Engineers of Japan and the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers.
Koichi Nakamura (M’89) received the B.A.Sc. de-
gree in engineering from Nagoya Institute of Tech-
nology, Nagoya, Japan, in 1966, and the Ph.D. degree
from Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan, in 1979.
He is currently a Professor in the Graduate School
of Engineering, Nagoya Institute of Technology,
Nagoya, Japan. His current research interests include
the physics of lightning, energy management sys-
tems, and signal processing applications to electric
systems.
Dr. Nakamura is a Member of the Institute of Elec-
trical Engineers of Japan and the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers.
Nobuyuki Matsui (M’89–SM’00–F’02) received the
B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from
Nagoya Institute of Technology, Nagoya, Japan, in
1966 and 1968, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree
from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan, in
1976.
Since 1968, he has been with the Department of
Electrical and Computer Engineering, Nagoya Insti-
tute of Technology, where he is currently a Professor
and is engaged in research and education on power
electronics and motion control. He was a Vice Presi-
dent of Nagoya Institute of Technology during 2000–2002.
Dr. Matsui is a Member of the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and
the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers.