An accurate frequency estimation in power networks in the presence of harmonics

The main frequency is an important parameter of an electrical power system. The frequency can change over a small range due to generation-load mismatches. Some power system protection and control applications, e.g., frequency relay for load shedding, load-frequency controller, require accurate and fast estimation of the frequency. Most digital algorithms for measuring frequency have acceptable accuracy if voltage waveforms are not distorted. However, due to nonlinear devices, e.g., semiconductor rectifiers, electric arc furnaces, the voltage waveforms can include higher harmonics. The paper presents a new method of measurement of power system frequency, based on digital filtering and Prony’s estimation method. Simulation results confirm, that the proposed method is more accurate than others, e.g., than the method based on the measurement of angular velocity of the rotating voltage phasor. A precise digital algorithm based on Discrete Fourier Transforms (DFT) to estimate the frequency of a sinusoid with harmonics in real-time is proposed. This algorithm that we called the Smart Discrete Fourier Transforms (SDFT) smartly avoids the errors that arise when frequency deviates from the nominal frequency, and keeps all the advantages of the DFT e.g., immune to harmonics and the recursive computing can be used in SDFT. These make the SDFT more accurate than conventional DFT based techniques. In addition, this method is recursive and very easy to implement, so it is very suitable for use in real-time. We provide the simulation results compared with a conventional DFT method and second-order Prony method to validate the claimed benefits of SDFT