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Power Quality Event Detection using Joint 2D-Wavelet Subspaces

Do gan G okhan Ece, Member IEEE, Omer Nezih Gerek, Member IEEE,
Abstract In this work, we present a novel 2D representation of power system waveforms for the automatic analysis and detection of transient events. The representation is composed of a matrix whose rows are formed by time segments of digital waveforms. By the appropriate selection of the time segment length, the 2D data exhibits wavelike image shapes. The general shape is immediately disturbed whenever a power quality transient event occurs. We propose the use of two dimensional discrete wavelet transforms (2DDWT) to detect these disturbances. It has been observed that, after omitting the approximation space signals of the wavelet transform and denoising the detail space signals, the inverse 2DDWT provides good detection and localization results, even for cases where conventional methods fail. Examples are presented. Keywords Power quality, event detection, 2D wavelet decomposition

I. Introduction Many events and disturbances in the power system voltage or current waveforms can be detected by just examining the waveforms with an expert eye. Automatic event detection is a research area which attempts to generate rules and tools that build up a system performing the way experts make the detection. The state-of-the-art tools utilizing wavelet decomposition may be used to develop such waveform processing systems. To detect, solve, and prevent the power quality (PQ) problems, an ecient post event processing of PQ data is required. A major post processing issue is feature extraction for detection, localization, and classication of PQ events. For this issue, wavelet analysis has proven to be a very strong and ecient tool. Wavelet analysis is capable of revealing features of data that other analysis tools could miss, including trends, breakdown points, discontinuities, and selfsimilarity. This issue has been well researched, and a survey in [2] cites a fair span of literature. Conventionally the event data as oscillographic waves of current or voltage is rst captured, then classical wavelet based or adaptive transforms are applied. Finally the output is analyzed by thresholding or other statistical techniques [3]-[8]. In this paper, we present a new two-dimensional (2D) analysis of the power quality data that enables ecient event detection and localization. The approach relies on a novel 2D representation of the waveform data and its 2D wavelet analysis. We rst develop the method to convert the waveform data into 2D. Next, the 2D discrete wavelet transform (2D-DWT) is proposed as the tool to apply on
This work is supported by Anadolu University Research Fund Under Contract: 000212. Authors are with Anadolu University, School of Engineering and Architecture, Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department, Eski sehir, TURKEY

the 2D data. Due to the new representation, the 2D-DWT automatically supplies the regular 1D wavelet subspaces, as well as subspaces which exploit other features that can only be observed in the 2D representation. To test the detection performance, we used voltage waveforms from real life power quality events captured at 20 kHz from an experimental system. Experimental system is composed of a three-phase wye-connected 380 V, 50 Hz, 25 kVA, 5-wire supply loaded with RL load banks and three-phase induction motors coupled with varying mechanical loads. System also includes adjustable speed drives controlling the induction motors for studying load generated harmonics. Data is captured using National Instruments PCIMIO16E4 A/D unit and LabVIEW 6.0 virtual instrument software. The use of computer generated data is avoided. Inherently, the 2D implementation has all the analysis benets of the regular DWT that were presented in the literature. Furthermore, the new approach is observed to have advantages in detection of PQ events that may not result in necessarily abrupt waveform discontinuities, but rather in slow waveform variations such as sags, swells and frequency uctuations that may not always be detected using 1D-DWT. II. 2D Representation of Event Data Waveform representation and enhancement sometimes improve the detectability of the features that can be missed when using the oscillographic data in its original form. The representation change from 1D voltage or current waveform to 2D image form is new in the area of power quality studies [1]. There is a great potential in analyzing the PQ event data in 2D because of the vast amount of research in the eld of image processing and image pattern recognition. The proposed 2D representation consists of a matrix whose rows correspond to non-overlapping segments of the waveform data. In this way, the data can be considered as an image or a 2D surface. The new representation has more operational exibility because of the available image processing tools in the literature. As a practical implementation detail, the time segments, which are placed in the rows, should have a duration of an integer multiple of the data period. In this way, the cyclo-stationary behaviour of the waveform is exploited well, and the image surface resembles water waves. The generation of a 2D image from the 1D data can be graphically illustrated as in Figure 1. In Figure g2(a), the 2D image generated from a real life PQ event is shown using the surface plot. The grayscale image corresponding to the same data is shown in Figure 2(b). The 2D representation has some signicant benets over the regular 1D signal representation. If an event in the

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lows:

(t) = (t) =

h0 [n]2(2t n) n h1 [n] 2(2t n)

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Fig. 1. 2D matrix (or image) generation from 1D data.

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Practically, h0 [n] is a low-pass lter and h1 [n] is a high-pass lter. For a 2D image of size M N , the DWT, hence the subband decomposition, is rst applied to the rows (horizontal process), producing two M N/2 matrices (denote by l and h). Then, the same decomposition structure is applied to each of the previously obtained matrices. The whole operation corresponds to one-level decomposition, and we obtain four images, each with sizes M/2 N/2 (denote by ll, lh, hl, and hh). The second-level decomposition corresponds to further decomposition of the ll image to produce llll, lllh, llhl, and llhh. For decomposing further, one should simply proceed with the decomposition of the low-pass approximation image at every stage. One-level decomposition structure is illustrated in Figure 3.
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Fig. 2. 2D matrix generated from an example real life transient: (a) in surface form, (b) in grayscale.

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power system produces a change in the magnitude of the voltage or current waveform (such as a sag, swell, and switchingon/o loads), the waveform usually has a short discontinuity at the beginning and at the end of the event. However, while the event continues, the waveform again exhibits a cyclo-stationary behaviour. Therefore, it is dicult to discriminate it from normal operation using frequency based or transform domain techniques. On the other hand, when the data is visualized in 2D, such an event produces horizontal lines or edges. These lines may be dicult to observe if the data is processed only in the horizontal direction. However, using the proposed method, we have the exibility of processing the 2D data in the vertical direction as well. A lter which has a high-pass characteristic in the vertical direction, therefore, clearly emphasizes the occurances and locations of such events. III. 2D Analysis of Transient Data In order to detect power quality disturbances in the 2D representation, we propose using 2DDWT which provides the necessary horizontal, vertical, and diagonal high pass ltering. 2DDWT can be thought as the direct 2D extension of the regular one dimensional discrete wavelet transform. It is known that the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is the projection of a discrete signal onto two spaces: the approximation space ((t)), and a series of detail (wavelet) spaces ( (t)). The implementation of this projection operations is done by discrete-time subband decomposition of input signals using ltering followed by downsampling. The relation between the lters in this structure (the lter bank) and the wavelet spaces is as fol-

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Fig. 3. One level lterank implementation of 2D-DWT.

In terms of wavelet notation, one level of decomposition corresponds to projecting the input signal onto four signal subspaces: The scaling function: (x, y ) = (x)(y )

The wavelet functions: V (x, y ) = (x)(y ) H (x, y ) = (x) (y ) D (x, y ) = (x) (y )

It is important to observe that (x, y ) (or the ll subimage) resembles the original image shape with onefourth the original size, whereas V (x, y ) (or the hl subimage) contains vertical, H (x, y ) (or the lh subimage) contains horizontal, and D (x, y ) (or the hh subimage) contains diagonal edgelike shapes in the original image. Due to the above observation, when one level 2D-DWT is applied to the PQ data in 2D, the 2D wavelet subspaces contain more features than the 1D transform of the original waveform. Usually, any waveform distortion produces strong horizontal edges on the 2D image. At the output

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ll
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Fig. 4. Pre-processing and one level lterank implementation of inverse 2D-DWT.

of 2DDWT, the lh subspace automatically contains vertically bandpassltered 2D signal samples. As a result, regardless of the type of event, the waveform variation is always clear in the lh image. It is noteworthy that lh image contains the necessary discriminating features even if the waveform distortion is smooth, which is usually the case for sags and swells. Therefore, we found the lh subspace to be the most useful subspace in terms of detection. Moreover, other detail subspaces, i.e. hl and hh, also contain band pass information which indicates sharp waveform distortions. The structure of disturbances in dierent subspaces provide us with some discriminating criteria for event identication. Events that cause smooth variations such as sags or swells exhibit disturbances in forms of horizontal lines in the lh subimage. In the hl subspace, such events may induce short disturbances at the transitions corresponding to the beginning and/or the end of the event. If the transitions are smooth without any high frequency uctuations, they may not induce any eect in the hl subspace. On the other hand, if the event is of an arcing fault type, it would induce pronounced short bursts of disturbances in all subspaces. The dierence between these behaviors may constitute a means of event identication. In order to combine the above information contained in separate subspaces into a single feature datum, we synthesize the subspace signals (i.e. lh, hl, and hh images) by inverse 2DDWT, while ignoring the ll subspace. Inverse 2DDWT is implemented by a synthesis lterbank as illustrated in Figure 4, where the branches consist of vertical and horizontal upsamplers (instead of downsamplers of an analysis lterbank) followed by synthesis lters. The result of the inverse 2DDWT is a 2D image at the original scale. Before inverting the 2DDWT, the ll subspace is suppressed because it contains an image which is approximately the same 2D representation of the waveform itself, so it does not contain featureonly signals. Since the lter bank implementation of inverse 2DDWT requires all four subspace images, we get rid of the ll subspace by seting its coecients to zero. Because of eliminating the ll component, the resulting reconstructed image does not exhibit the original oscillatory wavelike pattern. Instead, it is a

more highpass image having mostly fault and waveform disturbance components. A logical improvement before the inverse transform is to amplify the samples in lh subimage. It can be noted that most of the informative disturbance shapes occur in the lh subimage, therefore it constributes most to the nal reconstructed feature signal. The nal renement before the inverse transform is to clean the signal samples in subband images. Much of the signals with small magnitudes do not correspond to features that represent events, therefore we eliminated the small magnitudes by applying a threshold to the subimages and setting the smaller values to zero. This is a well known technique commonly used for denoising. There is a large amount of literature about the selection of threshold for denoising [9],[10]. However, the threshold selection techniques are mostly optimized for human perception of photographic images. Therefore, in order to achieve a useful denoised signal for our purpose, we have experimentally tested various PQ event waveforms and determined separate thresholds for each subband. At the end of the inverse transform, only the necessary features of the subspaces are scaled and combined (as in Figure 4). Since the resultant signal contains joined signals of the featurewise important subspaces, we call the output the joint feature 2-D wavelet subspace. At this point, the image can be reconstructed back to 1D using the rasterscan order, and can be called the joint feature waveform. This waveform is almost an event driven feature only subspace, skipping the signal characteristics of the original waveform. The events can be simply detected by comparing the feature waveform samples with zero. Any nonzero sample corresponds to an event at the time instant of the sample. This detection could also be done in the 2D denoised representation. However, the 1D signal also provides the event localization. Its ability to localize and spot the time instance of an event constitutes the advantage of the joint waveform over the direct use of 2D wavelet subspaces. It must be noted that the 1D joint feature waveform neither corresponds to, nor can be obtained from 1D wavelet decomposition. Many of the nonzero samples of the joint waveform, specically the ones produced by low frequency variations, come from the 2D processing of the data. Experimentally, we have observed that the general behaviour of the subimages and the joint feature waveform do not change with dierent choices of wavelets, such as various orders of Daubechies wavelets, Coiets, Morlets, etc. For the rest of the paper, we present the results obtained by using the celebrated Daubechies2 lter bank for the decomposition. The 2D wavelet decomposition requires twice the number of computations compared to 1D wavelet decomposition of the same data using the same wavelet lter bank. In this aspect, considering all the computations required for decomposition, denoising, detection, and inverse transformation, the total computational complexity of the proposed method is linearly proportional to any 1D wavelet based

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detection method. Although this method was proposed as an oline analysis tool, we have tested our algorithm with a TI TMS320067C11 oating point DSP processor kit which samples the waveform at 8 kHz and uses Daubechies 2 wavelet lter banks. The 2D representation width and height were set to 640 640. We have observed that, the DSP kit was capable of processing the waveform and detecting event samples in realtime. IV. Experimental results We have found the proposed method to perform well for the detection of a variety of events. Consider one level 2D DWT decomposition of a real life voltage waveform given in Figure 5. During acquiring this 40 seconds long line-toline voltage waveform, two dierent power quality events are staged. The events are line-to-ground arcing fault and two consequtive sags due to 3-phase induction motor startup. In the 1D-DWT, the arcing faults are observed to be detectable across various decomposition scales. However, the voltage sags are not apparent (Figure 6). On the other hand, both the voltage sags as long horizontal edges and the arcing faults as horizontal perturbations of short edge intervals are clearly visible in the lh-subimage of 2D-DWT decomposition. In Figure 7, the 2D-DWT data of Figure 5 is transformed to 1D using the joint form and presented. In order to display the locations of voltage sag events, the captured waveform shown in Figure 7(a) is displayed for a duration of approximately 20 seconds. Both in the 1D and 2D decompositions, the same Daubechies2 lters are used. Because of the high sampling rate, oscillations in the gure are not visible. The joint feature waveform using only the lh, hl, and hh subspaces and its denoised version are given in Figure 7(b) and (c) respectively. The denoised version includes the waveform disturbances due to events, whereas it does not have any noise components. This is an excellent improvement for easier thresholding for comparison. Notice that the arcing fault (the left-most peak) and two consecutive voltage sags due to induction motor starting events are clearly visible as nonzero waveform samples. Once this feature waveform is available, using a zero / nonzero comparison, PQ events are clearly detected and localized. The joint feature waveform contains all the discriminating information from lh, hl, and hh subimages. The advantage of using vertical processing of the 2D data becomes clear in the detection of the voltage sags. In Figure 5, the hl subimage carries similar information to the 1D wavelet processing of the signal. Notice that, although the arcing fault can be visually discriminated in hl sub image, the voltage sag events are not visible. This is also veried by the 1D decomposition in Figure 6. Therefore it is observed that some sags without high frequency content may not be detected using 1D wavelet based techniques. On the other hand, even for this case, arcing faults, as well as sags are visible in lh subimage, which can only be obtained using 2D wavelets. These properties of subimages also provides a means of event discrimination. If the event results in high magnitude samples in lh, hl, and hh sub images, then it corresponds to a high frequency variation,
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Fig. 5. One level 2D-DWT decomposition of an event data.

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Fig. 6. Three levels of 1D wavelet decomposition of data in Figure 5.

resulting from arcing faults. On the other hand, if it is not visible in hl and hh subimages, but pronounced in lh subimage, it corresponds to a waveform variation with lower frequency content, such as a voltage sag or a sub fundamental interharmonic contamination. We have also observed that a specic power quality disturbance, the frequency uctuations, can be detected by examining the ll subspace. In Figure 5, the wave segments are not straight and this implies a frequency uctuation. Furthermore, the tilt in the sinusoidal alignment indicates that the fundamental frequency is slightly less than the expected 50Hz. In the next example, the eects of interharmonic voltages and currents are examined. Interharmonics are important PQ events that may be due to adjustable speed drives. They appear as steady state currents or voltages at

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voltage 0.5 0 0.5 1 5 (a) 10 15 20 25

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Fig. 7. Joint feature waveform of data in Figure 5.

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Fig. 9. One level 2DDWT decomposition of voltage waveform with interharmonics.

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Fig. 8. Voltage waveform with interharmonics.

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noninteger multiples of the fundamental frequency. The wideband interharmonics are usually noiselike and easier to detect, whereas subfundamental interharmonics are much more dicult to detect. In order to test the proposed method for both cases, we added a wideband interharmonic and two narrowband interarmonics at 25 Hz and 185 Hz with 1% of the voltage magnitude. Notice that neither 25 Hz nor 185 Hz are integer multiples of 50 Hz. Specically, the 25 Hz. interharmonic is almost impossible to detect even by the expert eye (Figure 8). The 2DDWT of the data corresponding to Figure 8 is depicted in Figure 9. Notice that wideband and sub fundamental interharmonics are clearly visible, especially in the lh subimage. On the other hand, the hl sub image, which carries similar information to the 1D wavelet decomposition, is unable to depict the subfundamental interharmonic. When the ll image is omitted and inverse 2DDWT is applied, we obtain the 1D feature waveform in Figure 10(b). By further denoising, the joint feature waveform is obtained as in Figure 10(c). The nonzero magnitude samples correspond to events at the nonzero sample instances. As a last example, we take another real life event of

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Fig. 10. Feature waveform of data in Figure 9.

phasetoground arcing fault. During this experiment arcing fault recovers after several cycles of initiation and then strikes back again for several more cycles. From Figure 11, it is again apparent that the events are clearly visible in the approximation subimages: lh, hl, and hh. In order to obtain a single feature waveform, and to localize the events, the described joint data is obtained from the approximation subimages, and denoised in Figure 12. V. Conclusions In this paper, 2D representation and analysis of PQ event data is introduced. The 2D representation is observed to have advantages over the classical 1D data representation in terms of PQ event analysis and detection. In order to achieve event analysis, we used 2D-DWT decomposition of

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Arcing Fault

and Wavelet Transforms, IEEE Trans. on Power Delivery, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2000. [5] A. M. Gaouda, M .M. A. Salama, M. R. Sultan, and A. Y. Chikhani, Power Quality Detection and Classication Using Wavelet-Multiresolution Signal Decomposition, IEEE Trans. on Power Delivery, Vol. 14, No.4, 1999. [6] S. J. Huang and C. T. Hsieh, High Impedance Fault Detection Utilizing a Morlet Wavelet Transform Approach, IEEE Trans. On Power Delivery, Vol. 14, No. 4, 1999. [7] T. Zheng, E. B. Makram, and A. A. Girgis, Power System Transient and Harmonic Studies Using Wavelet Transform, IEEE Trans. on Power Delivery, Vol. 14, No. 4, 1999. [8] T. B. Littler and D. J. Morrow, Wavelets for the Analysis and Compression of Power System Disturbances, IEEE Trans. on Power Delivery, Vol. 14, No. 2, April 1999. [9] S. Sardy, Minimax threshold for denoising complex signals with Waveshrink, IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing, Vol. 48, No. 4, 2000. [10] G. Shi, F. Li, Image Denoising with Optimized Subband Threshold, Proc. 5th Int.l Conf. on Computational Intelligence and Multimedia App. (ICCIMA03), Sep. 27 - 30, 2003.

Fig. 11. One level 2DDWT decomposition of voltage waveform with arcing fault.
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Do gan G okhan Ece was born in Ankara, Turkey in 1964. He received the Engineer degree from Istanbul Technical University in 1986, the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., in 1990 and 1993, respectively all in electrical engineering. Currently he is professor of Electrical and Electronics Engineering in Anadolu University. His research areas include power quality, fault detection, and modelling.

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Omer Nezih Gerek was born in Eskisehir, Turkey in 1969. He received the Engineer, M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees from the Bilkent University in 1991, 1993, and 1998, respectively, all in electrical engineering. Following his Ph.D., he spent one year as a research associate at EPFL, Switzerland. Currently he is professor of Electrical Engineering in Anadolu University. His research areas include signal analysis, wavelets, and subband decomposition.

Fig. 12. Feature waveform of data in Figure 11.

the 2D representation. Due to the vertical and horizontal processing capability of the 2D-DWT, PQ events even with slow waveform variations were possible to detect. References
[1] [2] N. Gerek and D. G. Ece, 2-D Analysis and Compression of O. Power Quality Event Data, IEEE Trans. on Power Delivery, Vol. 19, No. 2, April 2004. Wael R. Anis Ibrahim and Medhat M. Morcos, Articial Intelligence and Advanced Mathematical Tools for Power Quality Applications: A Survey, IEEE Trans. on Power Delivery, Vol. 17, No. 2, April 2002. L. Angrisani, P. Daponte, and M. DApuzo, Wavelet NetworkBased Detection and Classication of Transients, IEEE Trans. on Instrument. and Meas., Vol. 50, No. 5, 2001 Surya Santaso, W. Mack Grady, and Edward J. Powers, Characterization of Distribution Power Quality Events with Fourier

[3] [4]