Continuous Wavelet Transform Based Analysis

of Low Frequency Oscillation in Power System

Md. Juel Rana1*, M. Shafiul Alam2, Md. Shariful Islam3
1,2
Dept. of EE, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals
Dhahran, Saudi Arabia
3
Dept. of EEE, Eastern University Bangladesh
Dhaka, Bangladesh
*
juelrana.eee@gmail.com

Abstract— Low frequency oscillation is a threat to the
stability of interconnected power system. Proper identification of
the low frequency oscillation is crucial. In this work continuous
wavelet transform (CWT) with complex morlet wavelet is used to
extract modal information of the power system oscillations. The
modal information of the measured signal such as frequency and
damping is determined from the magnitude and phase plot of the
complex valued wavelet coefficients. The proposed technique is
applied to the measured signal of a two area power system to
detect inter area mode of oscillation and results are compared
with Eigenvalue analysis method.
Keywords—Wavelet transform; low frequency oscillation;
complex morlet wavelet
I. INTRODUCTION
Electricity is the driving force for the development of
modern civilization. In the present trend of deregulated
electricity market environment the power system are more
likely to operate closer to their rated capacity due to the
increased competition among the power producers as well as
demand for the large block of power from the consumer side
[1].These factors increase the vulnerability of power system to
the disturbances. The stability of power system is crucial for
supplying electrical power to the consumer without loss of
reliability. The power system stability is defined as the
capability of the system to come back to normal operating
state after having gone through some sort of disturbances [2,
3].The poorly damped low frequency electromechanical
oscillation is one of the major disturbances faced by the
synchronous machines of the power system. There are two
types of low frequency oscillations in the power system
namely local area mode and inter area mode oscillation. Local
area mode corresponds to swinging of machines of one
particular area with respect to each other whereas machines of
one area swings with respect to machines of others area in
inter area mode of oscillations [4]. Typical, this oscillatory
phenomenon lies in the range of 0.1 to 1 Hz which can cause
the system outage due to the instability if effective preventive
measures are not taken timely [5].So, it is of great importance
to detect and extract the properties of these oscillations in
order to provide adequate damping through control [6].
As found in the literatures, lots of techniques have been
employed to determine the properties of low frequency
oscillations in the power system. The conventional method of
determining oscillation parameters is the eigenvalue analysis
based on linearized model of the power system. The
linearization of the system is done around certain operating
points. Since the operating point of a real power system is
varying, this method is not effective outside the predefined
operating points [2]. Moreover, it is an offline method for
observing the disturbances in the system.
The online measurement based techniques are of interest
as it does not require modeling of system and gives
information in the near real time operations. These methods
identify the system model and operating conditions from the
measured signal [7].
Signal processing techniques such as Prony analysis [8]
and Fourier spectrum analysis [9] have been used for
estimation of low frequency oscillations in the power system.
Prony analysis suitable for analysis of stationary (time
invariant) signal but the power systems dynamic is time
varying and non stationary in nature. Fourier spectrum
analysis gives the information only in the frequency domain
and corresponding time domain characteristics of the signal
are not present.
Kalman filtering technique has been used to detect the
temporal variation of mode parameters of oscillations [10].
But, the implementation of Kalman estimator requires prior
knowledge of the system transfer function which may not be
available in real time.
The wavelet transform is a popular signal processing tool
for analysis of non-stationary signals. It can extract signal
features both in time and frequency domain. The wavelet
transform has been applied in the analysis of various power
system phenomena like fault analysis [11], detection and
identification of power quality problems [12] and detection
and classification of power system transients [13].
This work proposes the application of complex morlet
wavelet based continuous wavelet transform (CWT) to detect
and extract the frequency and damping of low frequency
electromechanical oscillations in a two area four machine
power system.
 Where, x(t) is the signal of n damped sinusoids, Ak , ζk , fdk
II. CONTINUOUS WAVELET TRANSFORM and fk are the amplitude, damping ratio, damped natural
Continuous wavelet transform of any signal x (t) is can be frequency and undamped natural frequency of kth mode
expressed mathematically by the following equation [7] ,respectively. The continuous wavelet transform of the signal
x (t) using complex morlet wavelet can be implemented by
∞
W (a, b) = 1 ∫ x(t )ψ * ( t − b )dt
employing equations (1)-(3). The coefficients of wavelet
(1) transform obtained as follows
a −∞ a
a n

∑A e
2 2
Here, W (a, b) and ψ (t) are the wavelet coefficients and W(a, b) = k
−2π fkζ k b −π fb ( af − fc )
e e
j (2π fdk b+θk )
(6)
the mother wavelet function respectively. The parameters a 2 k =1
and b accounts for the scaling factor and translation factor of
the mother wavelet respectively. Scaling and shifting of the The wavelet coefficients are complex number and can
mother wavelet produces son wavelets. The scaling factor represent the multimode signal as a single mode signal [15].
controls the frequency of the son wavelets; higher the scales The value of wavelet coefficient will be maximum when
lower is the frequency and vice versa. Wavelet coefficients are akfk=fc occurs for a certain value of scaling parameter ak and
calculated from the convolution of son wavelets and the this scale ak of wavelet coefficients contains the modal
signal. In order to preserve energy at each scale the information of kth mode of signal. So, kth mode of the signal
with replacing b with t can be written in the amplitude and
convolution sum is multiplied by the factor 1 . The wavelet phase angle form as
a
transform (WT) represents the signal in both time and
frequency domain. The capability of localization of time and ak n

frequency with proper resolution makes the wavelet transform

W(ak ,t) =
2
∑Ae π ζ e
k=1
k
−2 fk kt j(2π fdkt+θk )
= W(ak ,t) ejφk (t) (7)
suitable for the analysis of signal having non-stationary
characteristics. ak n

There are different types of wavelet function such as

W ( ak , t ) =
2
∑Aek =1
k
−2π f k ζ k t
(8)
Gabor, Morlet, Mexican hat and Haar. It is found that the
complex morlet wavelet provide good results for the analysis φk(t) =arg[Wa
( k,t)]=2π fdkt +θk =2π fk (1−ζk2)t +θk (9)
of ring down signal as it possesses the good time and
frequency localization property to uncover the oscillatory Taking logarithm of the modulus of instantaneous
modes of the signal [14]. Mathematically, the complex morlet amplitude of wavelet coefficient presented above in equation
wavelet is given by the following expression (7), we get,
2
−t ak
1 j 2π fc t fb (2)
ψ (t ) = e e ln W (ak , t ) = −2π f k ζ k t + ln( Ak ) (10)
π fb 2
Where, fb is the bandwidth parameter of the mother Therefore, natural frequency of oscillation fk and damping
wavelet, fc is the center frequency, t is the time, and j is the ratio ζk can be obtained by calculating the slope of ln W (ak , t )
imaginary unit. The bandwidth parameter controls the shape of and arg[W (ak , t )] of equations (9)-(10). The slope can be
the wavelet.
determined using least square regression analysis. The small
The fourier transform of the mother wavelet function is time range in which amplitude and phase plot becomes linear
given by following equation contains the modal information of the signal.
1 2 2
(3)
ψ ( af ) = e − π f b ( af − f c )
π fb IV. POWER SYSTEM MODEL
The value of the ψ (af) will reach to the peak when af=fc. The well known four machines two area power system
The value of localized frequency component of the signal can shown in fig. 1 has been considered to simulate the low
be retrieved as follows frequency oscillation phenomena. The power system model
fc and associated data can be found in [2]. All the generators
f = (4) have been modeled using sub-transients model, static exciter
a Δt and simple turbine governor system. In order to simulate the
Where, ∆t is the sampling period of the signal. inter area mode of oscillation 5% step increase in the exciter
reference voltage of generator 2 (area I) and generator 3 (area
II) has been applied. The Power System Toolbox (PST)
III. PROPOSED METHOD functions have been used for time domain simulation of 20
The electromechanical oscillations of power system can be seconds. The PST is an open source matlab based tool box for
expressed as sum of damped sinusoids as given below. load flow and stability analysis of the power system. For this
n n work Power System Toolbox Version 3.0 has been used.
x(t) = ∑xk (t) = ∑Ak e−2π fkζkt cos(2π fdk t +θk ) (5)
k =1 k =1
 0.55 Hz and 15Hz respectively with sampling time 0.01
second. The contour plot of the measured power flow signal is
shown in fig. 4. From the figure it is seen that most of energy
of the wavelet coefficients lies at the starting and end of signal
around scale 107. So, there is only one dominant mode at scale
107 and signal is said to be stationary in this particular case.
The linear amplitude and phase plot of wavelet coefficients are
shown in fig. 5, and fig. 6, respectively.

Fig. 1. Four machine two area power system

V. SIMULATION RESULTS

A. Eigen Value Analysis

The frequency and damping information of oscillatory
Eigen mode have been calculated and plotted in the fig. 2, the
green marker in the figure corresponds to minimum damping.
Fig. 3. Active power flow

Fig. 2. Modes of the power system

Fig. 4. Contour plot of the energy of wavelet coefficients of the measured
signal
The Eigen mode of 21 exhibits least value of damping
ratio; therefore, it is the dominant mode of oscillation as
shown in Table I.

TABLE I
For the Eigen Mode 21
Eigen value Frequency Damping
(Hz) ratio (%)
-0.0232-3.3212i 0.5286 0.70

B. CWT Based Analysis

The active power flow between the two area measured
at the line between bus 6 and 7 is shown in the fig.3. The
proposed scheme of continuous wavelet transform has been
applied to extract the information of the measured signal. The
Fig. 5. Amplitude plot of the wavelet transform of the measured signal
center frequency (fc) and bandwidth parameter (fb) are taken as
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Wavelet 0.5088 -0.0226 0.7082
Transform

The frequency and damping information obtained using

continuous wavelet transform based technique are very close
to the results of Eigen value analysis method. This proves the
efficacy of proposed method in extracting the modal
information of low frequency oscillations in power system.

VI. CONCLUSION
In this work, continuous wavelet transform has been
applied to find the modal information of the power system low
frequency oscillations. The proposed method has been
presented mathematically. The results obtained from the
proposed method closely matches with the values obtained
from the Eigen value analysis method. This demonstrates the
effectiveness of the continuous wavelet transform based
technique in identifying the low frequency oscillations in
power system.

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