ACPT Detection of Power Quality Disturbance using a Multidimensional Approach in an Embedded System

Abstract

Power Quality (PQ) has emerged as an important
research field in recent years. The development and increasing
use of high power converters and the increase of nonlinear
loads with high power cause unwanted changes in the electrical
signals (current and voltage). These changes are called electrical
disturbances. To understand such disturbances and investigate
their causes, they must be firstly detected. This work proposes
a real time multidimensional approach for detecting PQ disturbances.
The innovation of this work is the use of a deviation
measure easily extracted from a multidimensional data space to
quantify the PQ disturbances. The method was implemented in a
FPGA (Field-programmable gate array) device using a LabVIEW
interface. It performed well with high detection rates and low
computational complexity for both simulated and real signals.
The proposed deviation measure may be useful as a general
power quality index.