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Automated Measurement Statistics and Calculation of Voltage and Current Harmonics
Automated Measurement Statistics and Calculation of Voltage and Current Harmonics
Automated Measurement Statistics and Calculation of Voltage and Current Harmonics
4, October 1986 23
DESIGN OF A SYSTEM FOR AUJTOMATED MEASUREMENT AND STATISTICS CALCULATION
OF VOLTAGE AND CURRENT HARMIONICS
ABSTRAcT
The design and operation of a portable, personal accurate representation of the harmonic state of a bus
computer-based system for the measurement and process- requires acquisition of much data, as well as an
ing of data on 60 Hz. and harmonic current and organized means of processing and presenting the
voltage amplitudes and phases, and for the production acquired data.
of statistics and time trends on those quantities is
described. Over the data acquisition interval, which This paper describes the design and operation of
may be several days in length, the system calculates a portable, personal computer-based system for the
and stores for each selected harmonic frequency of measurement and processing of data on 60 Hz and har-
each selected voltage or current channel, statistics monic current and voltage amplitudes and phases, and
chosen from among: Mean, Mean Square Value, Variance, for the production of statistics and time trends on
Maximum, Minimum. Trends in composite quantities such those quantities. The system was designed for use in
as Telephone Influence Factor and Total Harmonic Dis- troubleshooting cases of harmonics problems and for
tortion may also be calculated over the interval. gathering data on the present level of harmonic
Samples of the graphical presentation of statistical "pollution" on the power network. It also would be of
results are included. use in non-harmonic situations such as in monitoring
power factor variations, daily load profiles, and bal-
ance among phases. The system described here is
INTRODUCrION intended to be more flexible in application than con-
ventional line voltage condition monitors and
As harmonic producing loads become more common on recorders, and to process data in real time so that
the power network and as they represent larger frac- useful results are immediately available in the field.
tions of the total load, the consequences of the Significant characteristics of this system include the
resulting current and voltage distortions are becoming following: extensive use of software rather than
more significant. In order to understand the harmonic hardware to implement signal processing functions;
situation on a given bus and to predict the effects of applicability to a wide range of measurements includ-
that situation, it is necessary to acquire and process ing harmonic and 60 Hz voltage and current, and
data on the harmonics, and to present that data in an daily trends; on-line data processing and graphics
easily comprehensible form. Previous work (1-51 has display eliminating the need for centralized, off-line
been primarily theoretical or has reported results for processing. A relatively low cost system has been
particular harmonic-producing loads using relatively achieved by use of commercially-available personal
expensive laboratory instrumentation adapted to the computer equipment and a minimum of custom-built
purpose. An ongoing study [61 is gathering data on hardware.
radiated interference in the frequency range from 60
Hz to 30 MHz. Some beginning work [7-9] has been Precautions have been taken in the design of this
reported on techniques for data reduction and statist- system to avoid sources of error common to digital (as
ical analysis to process the raw data into convenient opposed to conventional analog) frequency analysis
and immediately usable form. techniques. These include use of four-pole
anti-aliasing filters, a high resolution (12 bit) A/D
Except in unusual cases, the current and voltage converter, and phase locked loop to synchronize sam-
harmonics on a bus will vary in amplitude and phase pling to the input fundamental frequency (nominally 60
angle over time. These variations are analogous to Hz).
the 60 Hz load current and voltage variations over a
daily period, but typically contain more rapid varia-
tions because of the controlled nature of many SYSTEM CAPABILITIES
harmonic sources. Further, individual harmonics can-
not be assumed to vary in synchronism. Therefore, a Following is a summary of the variables and
large number of harmonics (possibly as many as 50) statistics capable of being measured and calculated
must occasionally be studied. It is clear that an during data runs. Additional types of information
(such as effects on specific types of equipment) may
be derived off-line using these basic results.
0885-8977/86/1000-0023$01.00O©1986 IEEE
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24
2) Current and voltage magnitude ranges determined by The resolution of the A/D converter was selected
transducers (current and potential transformers); to maintain acceptable performance on low amplitude
harmonics. The uantization noise power of an A/D
3) Analog voltage gains of 1, 2.5, 5, 10, 25, 50 converter is S /12 where S is the voltage step size.
switch-selectable to accommodate differing transducer Since this noise power is uniformly distributed over
outputs. Full scale transducer output (including all frequencies in the frequency domain output, the
effect of current shunt) must lie in the range of 0.1 noise power per harmonic may be found by dividing by
to 10 volts to achieve desired accuracy. the number of discrete frequencies in the output
transform. This is equal to N/2 where N is the number
4) Maximum amplitude measurement error of one petcent of samples taken by the A/D converter. Hence the
of full scale. quantization noise power at any harmonic is S2/6N.
The 12 bit A/D converter used here maintains at least
5) Maximnum phase measurement error of i 2 degrees for a 20 dB signal to quantization noise ratio on harmonic
fundamental frequency through the fifteenth harmonic. measurements over an input dynamic range of 2000:1 on
the low frequency range and 4000:1 on the high fre-
6) Two frequency ranges with corresponding sampling quency range.
rates are available: a low frequency range (60 to
1000 Hz) using 1 to 7 channels, and a high frequency Seven independent analog input channels are
range using 1 or 2 channels. provided to accommodate measurement of voltage harmon-
ics on 3 phases and current harmonics on 4 lines (3
7) On the low frequency range, 32 samples per cycle phases and neutral). Also provided on each channel
of the 60 Hz waveforms are taken; on the high frequen- are four-pole active lowpass filters to limit the sig-
cy range, 128 samples per cycle are taken. nal bandwidth before sampling. Plug-in capacitor
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25
troublesome in attempting to measure low-amplitude
harmonics.
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26
CT rat io,c
Gain 1. 00000 1. 00000 1. (:)0:C)00t
2
H ri± rii H rl±+ri1 H ril rii
4
H rgi±rii H r,i+r H ril+r,i
6
7
1 C)
11
12
13
14
15
THO N N
EPS
IPS/P (re
o-nri h r' ri
Fig. 2 Flow diagram of data acquisition and process- Fig. 3 Example of CRT output displaying types of sta-
ing program. tistical data available from a data run for
specific channels and harmonic frequencies.
Key to abbreviations: a: amplitude (p would
Fig.
3 shows a screen printout illustrating the indicate phase angle); V: voltage; I:
manner in which the program assists the user. This current; m: mean; ±m: min. and max.
display summarizes the available data produced in the values; THD: total harmonic distortion; EPS:
data acquisition program with respect to analog chan- envelope power spectrum; IPS/P: interphase
nels used, harmonics studied, and statistics gathered. statistics on phase angle.
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t-lu
27
culations, whereas the digital system may
simultaneously measure and calculate statistics on
many harmonics for several input channels.
6.93
6.98
S. S8
mmax
6.23
9.87
5.62
5.17
f 4.82
Ea 4.4? (a)
c 4.12
o 3.76
: 3.41
4.,
2
0.
3.96
E 2. 7i
0
2.36
£c4,o
time
2.34
2.18
Fig. 4 Equipment arrangement of pseudo-random harmon- 2.93
ics test generator. 1.87
1.71
1. 96
D.E 1.49
o
The PASCAL code for the simulator contains five go 1.24
major functions: random number generator; digital
filter to add any desired amount of correlation among
C 1.9s
channels; generation of firing times with respect to o 4.9
AC voltage zero crossings from the filtered random D o.
numbers; storage to RAM for fast recall; output via a _ 9.62
o-
digital parallel I/O port. E 9.46
0
X s . 27
To validate the A/D conversion, FFT, and data -1 - i---I-
processing hardware and software, a time trend plot time in minutes i.39 9s.9
from this system is compared to a plot produced on a
strip chart recorder using an analog wave analyzer in Fig. 6 Comparison of digital and conventional
Fig. 6. The only discernible differences appear to measurement results; fundamental current
be due to the physical response time limitations of amplitude vs. time as measured with: (a) an
the analog chart recorder. It should be noted that analog wave analyzer and strip chart recorder,
the analog system is only capable of producing one and (b) the digital measurement system.
type of output, and performs no statistical data cal- Scales in the two cases correspond.
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28
Harmonic Probabilities Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) method of frequency ana-
lysis. In single phase situations the measurement
Time trend data are useful in correlating system produces phase angle histograms of the same
observed problems with harmonic levels, and for aid in form as the harmonic amplitude histograms previously
understanding the sources of harmonics. However, described. However, such a two-dimensional form is
other representations such as histograms or cumulative not convenient to depict phase angle relations among
probability distributions more directly relate to har- all phases of a conventional three-phase system. For
monic effects such as telephone interference, this situation a three-dimensional graphics display
capacitor failures, or transformer overheating. The was developed. Choosing phase A as the reference, the
data of Fig. 5 are repeated as histograms in Fig. 7. x and y directions of this 3-D coordinate system
Often the percentage of time during which a harmonic represent phase angles of phases B and C, respective-
is above some particular value is signficant; this ly, and the z direction represents the number of
information may easily be produced by numerical occurences of each pair of phase angles of phases B
integration of the histogram data to produce cumula- and C. For example, the origin represents 00 of phase
tive distribution plots. shift of phases B and C with respect to A. The column
of height z=n located at x=120, y=-120 represents n
occurences of the standard fundamental frequency phase
HARMONIC HISTOGRAM relations in a three phase system.
22Z1 . c
channel 4 Fig. 8 illustrates this graphical display scheme
harmonic 1 for the fundamental and third harmonic on a three
phase system. In this laboratory situation the vol-
0
v (a)
L
Li
0
(a)
.0
amps
bin overflow:
HARMONIC HISTOGRA
1845. W
channel 4
harmrtonic 3 90
c
FUNDAMENTAL, PHASE REFERENCE: 0 A
a
L (b)
3
L
RELATIVE PHASE, FREQUENCY OF OCCURENCE
0
u
c4
1li.fl dl
0
ihIhhiI}hAIII1
(b)
."LLi FL
)-J-LLJ4LA4J-LA~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ - -----4-
-
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29
VS -20
-4$
t -- (8] D. A.
Power
Bradley,
"Graphical Representation of
System
Harmonic Data," International
Conference on Harmonics in Power Systems, Worces-
ter Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA, Oct.
-6$
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30
APPENDIX which is expected to occur, and i=L is associated with
the largest amplitude (Xmax). The amplitude range
MATHEMATICAL DEFINITION OF STATISTICS associated with each element is then (Xmax - Xmin)/L =
DX and the amplitude of the center of the range at a
Following are definitions of the basic statistics particular index may be found from
which are collected and displayed by the system.
Time-Dependent Statistics
Xi =
Xmin + DX(i 1/2)
The histogram software operates by comparing each
following statistics are calculated
The and measured value to the amplitudes corresponding to each
presented versus time over the data acquisition inter- index, and incrementing the value stored in that
val: mean, mean square value, extremes, variance. indexed location by one. On completion of the obser-
Each statistic is calculated for the specified subin- vation interval, the sum over all array locations is
terval length (referred to as T seconds here) and equal to the number of measurements, and each location
stored. The complete data acquisition period is contains the number of occurrences of the correspond-
divided into M subintervals, so that the total obser- ing amplitude range. Hence a probability distribution
vation time is equal to M*T seconds. Storing the data may be obtained by dividing each location value by the
in this way enables time variations over the observa- total number of measurements.
tion period to be presented.
Note that the maximum and minimum histogram
The mean for each subinterval is defined as: amplitudes must be established at setup time. If
larger of smaller actual values occur, their values
K cannot be included in the histogram. To monitor these
Xn = 1/K
i-1
Xn events, a counter is incremented for each measurement
which exceeds the histogram range. The histogram is
plotted as a bar graph with bar height representing
where K measurements are taken during each subinterval relative frequency of occurence of each amplitude.
and Xn represents the rms value of the current or vol-
tage harmonic n from each measurement. The mean The histogram concept may be extended to more
square value is calculated similarly: than one dimension to indicate the probability rela-
tion between two (or more) variables. In particular,
it is often desirable to compare quantities among the
X- l/K three phases of a power bus. The direct approach
i=l
(Xn) would require a three-dimensional array, with each
element representing a particular set of amplitudes
From the above values the variance and standard devia- (or phase angles) among the three phases. However, by
tion may be found: normalization of the measurments to one of the phases,
the important information on differences from that
phase may be stored in a two-dimensional array which
]1/ 2 is more compact and more easily displayed. Relative
[x[ Xg - (Xn)]
(-
2
phase angle information among phases A, B, and C is
The maximum and minimum values are easily found: important in engineering studies and diagnosis of har-
monics problems; the generation of these histograms
Xn max Max[ Xn ] over K measurements will be described.
The exactly analogous
procedure is to the
single-variable case. Phase A will be chosen as the
Xn min = Min[ Xn ] over K measurements
phase to which the other phase angles are normalized.
An array Hn(i,j) is used, where index i refers to the
Each of the above values is stored with respect angle of phase B normalized by the angle of phase A
to anindex representing time from the beginning of (0B - OA) and index j refers to the angle of phase C
the observation interval so that actual clock time may normalized by the angle of phase A (OC - 0A). In the
be associated with each data point. case of phase angles (which range between -180 and
+180 degrees) there is no overflow problem. For each
measurement of the selected quantity (current or vol-
Time-Independent Statistics tage of a particular harmonic) the phase angle on
phase A is subtracted from the phase angles on phases
Sample probability distributions (often referred B and C, and the indexes i and j corresponding to this
to ashistograms) may be produced for any current or pair of phases is found. The contents of the indexed
location is then incremented by one. The resulting
voltage harmonic over the entire observation period.
They are calculated by creating an initially empty histogram is three-dimensional, with two dimensions
array Hn(i) of elements indexed by i over the range representing phases B and C, and the third dimension
from i=l to i=L where each element indexed by i is representing the number of occurrences of each normal-
associated with a range of harmonic amplitudes. Index ized phase angle pair.
i=1 is associated with the smallest amplitude (Xmin)
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