Application of Spectral Kurtosis to Characterize Amplitude Variability in Power Systems’ Harmonics

Abstract

The highly-changing concept of Power Quality (PQ) needs to be continuously reformulated due to the new schemas of the power grid or Smart Grid (SG). In general, the spectral content is characterized by their averaged or extreme values. However, new PQ events may consist of large variations in amplitude that occur in a short time or small variations in amplitude that take place continuously. Thus, the former second-order techniques are not suitable to monitor the dynamics of the power spectrum. In this work, a strategy based on Spectral Kurtosis (SK) is introduced to detect frequency components with a constant amplitude trend, which accounts for amplitude values’ dispersion related to the mean value of that spectral component. SK has been proven to measure frequency components that follow a constant amplitude trend. Two practical real-life cases have been considered: electric current time-series from an arc furnace and the power grid voltage supply. Both cases confirm that the more concentrated the amplitude values are around the mean value, the lower the SK values are. All this confirms SK as an effective tool for evaluating frequency components with a constant amplitude trend, being able to provide information beyond maximum variation around the mean value and giving a progressive index of value dispersion around the mean amplitude value, for each frequency component.