The present invention relates to a method for deciding the direction to a flickering source in relation to a measurement point in an electrical network with alternating current with a network frequency (fc) with low-frequency amplitude variation from the flickering source. The invention is characterized in that the method comprises the steps: - recording of an amplitude-modulated current signal (i(n)) comprising signals that originate from the network frequency (fc) and the low-frequency amplitude variations in the current signal (i(n)); - recording of an amplitude-modulated voltage signal ((u(n)) comprising signals that originate from the network frequency (fc) and the low-frequency amplitude variations in the voltage signal (u(n)); - creation of a flicker power with a sign value by multiplication of the low-frequency amplitude variations in the current signal and the low-frequency amplitude variations in the voltage signal, and - analysis of the sign value, with the sign value indicating in which direction the flickering source is to be found in relation to the measurement point. The method also comprises an arrangement designed to be used when carrying out the method.

Industries that produce flicker are often placed close to each other and connected to the same power grid system. This implies that the measured flicker level at the point of common coupling (PCC) is a result of contribution from a number of different flicker sources. In a mitigation process it is essential to know which one of the flicker sources is the dominant one. We propose a method to determine the flicker propagations and trace the flicker sources by using flicker power measurements. Flicker power is considered as a quantity containing both sign and magnitude. The sign determines if a flicker source is placed downstream or upstream with respect to a given monitoring point and the magnitude is used to determine the propagation of flicker power throughout the power network and to trace the dominant flicker source. This paper covers the theoretical background of flicker power and describes a novel method for calculation of flicker power that can be implemented in a power network analyzer. Also conducted simulations and a field test based on the proposed method will be described in the paper.

This paper presents the two main types of classification methods for power quality disturbances based on underlying causes: deterministic classification, giving an expert system as an example, and statistical classification, with support vector machines as an example. An expert system is suitable when one has limited amount of data and sufficient power system expert knowledge, however its application requires a set of threshold values. Statistical methods are suitable when large amount of data is available for training. Two important issues to guarantee the effectiveness of a classifier, data segmentation and feature extraction, are discussed. Segmentation of a sequence of data recording is pre-processing to partition the data into segments each representing a duration containing either an event or transition between two events. Extraction of features is applied to each segment individually. Some useful features and their effectiveness are then discussed. Some experimental results are included for demonstrating the effectiveness of both systems. Finally, conclusions are given together with the discussion of some future research directions.

Developments in measurement technology, communication and data storage have resulted in measurement systems that produce large amount of data. Together with the long existing need for characterizing the performance of the power system this has resulted in demand for automatic and efficient information-extraction methods. The objective of the research work presented in this thesis was therefore to develop new robust methods that extract additional information from voltage and current measurements in power systems. This work has contributed to two specific areas of interest. The first part of the work has been the development of a measurement method that gives information how voltage flicker propagates (with respect to a monitoring point) and how to trace a flicker source. As part of this work the quantity of flicker power has been defined and integrated in a perceptionally relevant measurement method. The method has been validated by theoretical analysis, by simulations, and by two field tests (at low-voltage and at 130-kV level) with results that matched the theory. The conclusion of this part of the work is that flicker power can be used for efficient tracing of a flicker source and to determine how flicker propagates. The second part of the work has been the development of a voltage disturbance classification system based on the statistical learning theory-based Support Vector Machine method. The classification system shows always high classification accuracy when training data and test data originate from the same source. High classification accuracy is also obtained when training data originate from one power network and test data from another. The classification system shows, however, lower performance when training data is synthetic and test data originate from real power networks. It was concluded that it is possible to develop a classification system based on the Support Vector Machine method with “global settings” that can be used at any location without the need to retrain. The conclusion is that the proposed classification system works well and shows sufficiently high classification accuracy when trained on data that originate from real disturbances. However, more research activities are needed in order to generate synthetic data that have statistical characteristics close enough to real disturbances to replace actual recordings as training data.

The support vector machine (SVM) is a powerful method for statistical classification of data used in a number of different applications. However, the usefulness of the method in a commercial available system is very much dependent on whether the SVM classifier can be pretrained from a factory since it is not realistic that the SVM classifier must be trained by the customers themselves before it can be used. This paper proposes a novel SVM classification system for voltage disturbances. The performance of the proposed SVM classifier is investigated when the voltage disturbance data used for training and testing originated from different sources. The data used in the experiments were obtained from both real disturbances recorded in two different power networks and from synthetic data. The experimental results shown high accuracy in classification with training data from one power network and unseen testing data from another. High accuracy was also achieved when the SVM classifier was trained on data from a real power network and test data originated from synthetic data. A lower accuracy resulted when the SVM classifier was trained on synthetic data and test data originated from the power network.

This paper proposes a novel method for classifying voltage disturbances in electric power systems by using the Support Vector Machine (SVM) method. The proposed SVM classifier is designed to classify five common types of voltage disturbances and experiments have been conducted on recorded disturbances with good classification results. The proposed SVM classifier is also shown to be robust in terms of using training data and testing data that originate from two different power networks.

Method and arrangement for deciding the direction to a flickering source in relation to a measurement point in an electrical network with alternating current with a network frequency with low-frequency amplitude variations from the flickering source. The method includes the steps: recording an amplitude-modulated current signal having signals that originate from the network frequency and the low-frequency amplitude variations in the current signal; recording an amplitude-modulated voltage signal having signals that originate from the network frequency and the low-frequency amplitude variations in the voltage signal; creating a flicker power with a sign value by multiplication of the low-frequency amplitude variations in the current signal and the low-frequency amplitude variations in the voltage signal, and analyzing the sign value, with the sign value indicating in which direction the flickering source is to be found in relation to the measurement point.