Recursive Multi-Channel Prony for PMU

Abstract

The phasor estimation process is important in monitoring, controlling and protecting power networks. Prony's method can be used as an estimator by which electrical power system parameters are approximated. The Prony algorithm is challenging under noise conditions due to its frequency-adaptive parameter estimations. Joining several channels of PMUs was suggested recently in the literature as a way to counter this. However, implementing this comes at the expense of a considerable increase in the computational burden and thereby its applicability is restricted in real-time applications. A recursive multi-channel Prony technique is presented in this paper where several channels are used to estimate the phasor of one variable (voltage/current) accurately and efficiently. The proposed method speeds up the phasor estimation process by utilising the previous estimates. Various requirements presented in IEEE standard C37.118.1 are employed to assess the performance of the proposed method in different conditions. Finally, the proposed method is examined by two real-world data-sets: Measured current from a Mexican power system, processed offline in MATLAB, and measured voltage from National Instrument devices, processed online in LABVIEW. The proposed method performs efficiently for both the synthesised and real data.