IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 47, NO.
5, OCTOBER 1998
Power Measurement Using the Wavelet Transform
Weon-Ki Yoon and Michael J. Devaney, Member, IEEE
Abstract— This paper provides the theoretical basis for and
demonstrates the practical application of power/energy and rms
measurements directly from the wavelet transform data associ-
ated with each voltage current element pair. The advantage of
using the wavelet transform data directly is that it provides the
distribution of the power and energy with respect to the indi-
vidual frequency bands associated with each level of the wavelet
analysis. Frequency separation into the various wavelet levels is
achieved using IIR filters because their magnitude characteristics
are much better than typical FIR filters of equivalent complexity.
The IIR polyphase network strategy yields a simpler wavelet filter
bank design.
Index Terms— Digital signal processing, IIR filter, measure-
ment, polyphase networks, power, RMS, subband, wavelets.
I. INTRODUCTION
T HE increased utilization of nonlinear power electronics
coupled with the more prevalent use of more sensitive
computer-controlled and microprocessor-based equipment has
brought power quality issues on the distribution network to
the forefront. In this environment, power quality analysis
strategies have usually been divided into those which address
steady-state concerns, such as harmonic distortion or voltage
imbalance, and transient concerns, like those resulting from
faults or switching transients. Techniques such as Fourier
spectral analysis or symmetrical components are often applied
to the former class of problems while wavelets, classical
transient analysis, and computer modeling are traditionally
used for the latter.
This study provides the basis for the use of the wavelet
transform for power/energy and rms measurements under
both transient and steady-state situations and demonstrates
its application to both simulated and actual power system
waveforms.
The wavelet transform has proven a powerful signal pro-
cessing tool in communications in such areas as, data com-
pression, denoising, reconstruction of high-resolution images,
and high-quality speech. In the power systems area, it has
also been quite successful in identifying various categories of
power system disturbances [6], [7].
In the analysis process of the wavelet transform, the given
signal is decomposed into its constituent wavelet subbands or
levels. Each of these levels represents that part of the original
signal occurring at that particular time and in that particular
frequency band. These individual bands tend to be of uniform
width, with respect to the log of their frequencies, as opposed
Manuscript received May 18, 1998; revised November 30, 1998.
The authors are with the Digital Power Instrumentation Group, Department
of Electrical Engineering, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211 USA.
Publisher Item Identifier S 0018-9456(98)09777-0.
0018–9456/98$10.00  1998 IEEE
1205
to the uniform frequency widths of the Fourier spectral bands.
In the common dyadic decomposition to be used, the subbands
are separated from adjacent subbands by a frequency octave.
These decomposed signals possess the powerful time-
frequency localization property, which is one of the major
benefits provided by the wavelet transform. That is, the
resulting decomposed signals can then be analyzed in both
the time and frequency domains.
Analysis usually focuses on individual signals [6], [7].
However, in the case of power measurement, the voltage
and current wavelet transforms are derived from the sequence
of concurrent – samples using a common orthonormal
wavelet basis applied over each power system cycle. Since the
individual subbands for voltage and current are registered in
both time and frequency, each associated – product subband
represents the contribution of this band to the total – element
average power or cycle energy. The summation of these signed
subband powers then results in the total average power for this
– element pair. Power would normally be used under steady-
state conditions, whereas the energy frequency distribution
would be of importance under transients.
In a similar manner, the square of the points in the individual
voltage and current subbands represents the squared contribu-
tions of these individual subbands to the total rms voltage
or current. That is, because the subband contributions are
orthogonal, the mean squared contributions of each subband
can be added to form the mean square of the total voltage or
current. The square root of this sum will yield the total rms
value, while the square root of each subband mean square will
yield the respective contribution of this subband to this total
rms value.
In three-phase power systems, the power or energy contri-
butions of each phase (or element in the case of 3-wire or
2-element metering) can be summed at each subband level
to determine the contribution of the frequencies within this
subband to the three-phase total power or energy.
For the accurate analysis of power system data, good fre-
quency separation is required among the decomposed versions
of the original. The roll-off characteristics of the high-pass
and low-pass filter pairs used in developing the wavelet trans-
forms strongly influence the accuracy of the resulting subband
frequency distributions. Frequency separation into the various
wavelet levels is achieved using IIR filters because their
magnitude characteristics are much better than typical FIR
filters of equivalent complexity. The IIR polyphase network
strategy yields a simpler wavelet filter bank design [2]–[4],
[8].
1206 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 47, NO. 5, OCTOBER 1998

II. WAVELET THEORY

Daubechies, in her classic work, provides the foundation for
the wavelet transform and its origin in multiresolution [1]. She
shows that the orthonormal wavelet basis is formed from the
multiresolution property.

A. Multiresolution Analysis and Orthonormal Basis

Multiresolution analysis provides a natural framework for
the understanding of wavelet basis and construction of the
wavelet transform [1]. Multiresolution analysis consists of a
sequence of successive approximation space and has the
Fig. 1. The analysis part of the wavelet transformation.
following properties:
and
the high-pass magnitude response being the mirror image of
where is the orthogonal complement of in and the low-pass response when viewed with respect to the filter
means the orthogonal sum of two subspaces. Orthonormal bank’s middle frequency [3].
scaling functions are included in , and
Orthonormal wavelet basis are in The III. POWER MEASUREMENTS USING WAVELETS
dilated and translated wavelet basis becomes
The power measurements consist of and power.
(1) The following are the definitions of these parameters [5]:

with and
and (2)

B. Subband Filtering
where and are the current and voltage signals respectively
An efficient hierarchical algorithm, for the computation of period
of the wavelet coefficients of a given function has been
developed [1]. The wavelet coefficient at the th level and th
A. Wavelet Transforms of the Signals, and
time is
The power signals can be represented by the wavelet trans-
form as follows: If and represent square-integrable density
functions, they can be represented as
(3)

The coefficient is obtained by convolving the sequence (6)

with and then decimating by a factor
of 2. The scaling function coefficient at th level and th time where
becomes
and (7)
(8)
(4)

with where
and (5) and (9)

The procedure is given as follows: From the scaling coef- Scaling level is the lowest band of the original signal and
ficient is computed by (3) and by (4). Then, includes the fundamental frequency component of the power
(3) and (4) are applied recursively to compute and system. Wavelet level includes the signals of successively
from etc. This is called the analysis part of the wavelet higher octave frequency bands.
transform as shown in Fig. 1. The scaling function and the wavelet basis are of
In Fig. 1, the results of the wavelet transform are the scaling orthonormal basis and have following properties:
coefficient and wavelet coefficients and The
high-pass filter is constructed from the low-pass filter where
by reversing the order of the real coefficients. This results in where (10)
YOON AND DEVANEY: POWER MEASUREMENT USING THE WAVELET TRANSFORM 1207

B. RMS Calculation
Rms of current or voltage in power system can be described
as follow, based on the wavelet property (10):

Fig. 2. Two-channel polyphase filter bank structure [y0 (n) and y1 (n) are
the outputs of low-pass filter H (z ) and high-pass filter G(z ); respectively].

(13)

If and are periodic waves with the period then the

(11)
power is

When is a periodic signal with the period

(14)

(12)
where is the power of lowest frequency subband and
are the set of powers of each frequency subband or
where the first is the rms value of lowest frequency wavelet-level higher than or equal to scaling-level
subband and are the set of rms values of each
frequency subband or wavelet-level higher than or equal
to scaling level IV. TWO-CHANNEL IIR POLYPHASE FILTERS
The wavelet filter bank with IIR filters has been developed
C. Power Calculation
in [2] and [8] for perfect reconstruction in the context of image
If the wavelet coefficients of and are scaled by the same coding at low bit rates. The main advantage of IIR filters com-
function and the same wavelet basis the energy pared with FIR filters is good frequency selectivity and higher
is described by the scaling and the wavelet coefficients as computational efficiency, both of which are very important in
follows, based on the wavelet property (10): real-time power measurement systems. The orthogonal low-
pass and high-pass filters can be represented by the polyphase
IIR filters as follows:

(15)

where and are IIR low-pass and high-pass filters,

respectively. In (15), and use same all-pass filters
and Fig. 2 shows the IIR polyphase filter bank
based on (15). The input sequence alternately switches
to or which represents even or odd indexes of
resulting in the same effect as decimating by two. The
decimated signals are fed into polyphase filter banks. This
scheme reduces the computational effort to approximately one
eighth that of the conventional wavelet filtering scheme, shown
in Fig. 1, which consist of filtering and decimating by two.
1208 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 47, NO. 5, OCTOBER 1998
TABLE I
THE NUMBER OF COEFFICIENTS, FREQUENCY BANDS AND HARMONICS OF THE
WAVELET LEVELS AT 128 POINTS PER 60-Hz FUNDAMENTAL CYCLE
V. EVALUATION
The evaluation examines two test sets. The first one is
derived from an analytic signal and the second is data acquired
from a bus in an industrial power system. These power
measurements are performed on one cycle of the signal under
steady state conditions.
A. The RMS and Power of the Simulated Signal
Six levels of the wavelet transform result from 128
points per 60-Hz fundamental cycle as derived from the
simulated signal. Table I shows the wavelet level with the
associated numbers of the coefficients, frequency bands and
the odd harmonics which are included in these frequency
bands. Level is the scaling level and the rest are the wavelet
levels.
Simulated input signals and have first, fifth, and
eleventh harmonics as follows:
and
Table II compares the results among the “true” values, the
ones using Beylkin’s 18-length FIR filter, and the others using
the proposed IIR polyphase filter. means
that all-pass filters and shown in Fig. 2, have
four coefficients [2]. The total results of rms and power are
the same in all cases. This proves that the proposed rms
and power calculation methods using the wavelet coefficients
agree. In the cases of Beylkin’s or IIR polyphase filter bank,
according to the roll-off characteristics of each filter bank,
the leakage happens at each level. But, using IIR
filter bank produces more accurate results in rms and power
measurements than using Beylkin’s FIR filter bank.
B. Analysis of Industrial Power System Data
In Figs. 3 and 4, the current and voltage pair represent
one cycle (64 point) of phase A data from the actual three-
phase power disturbance. Parts (a) of the figures, wavelet
coefficient graphs, result from using two-channel IIR
polyphase filtering schemes. In the figures, axis represents
the wavelet level, which represents the frequency subband
from Table I. Sixty-four (26) points per cycle sampling results
in five wavelet levels. The axis represents one cycle
TABLE II
RMS AND POWER TEST OF FIRST, FIFTH, AND ELEVENTH HARMONIC SIGNALS
Fig. 3. Wavelet transform of the voltage data of one cycle (64 point) using
IIR (L = 6) polyphase filter banks. (The ratio of level 23 and the others
is 1 : 100.)
period. Thus, Figs. 3–5 demonstrate the wavelet property of
time–frequency localization. The rms values of each wavelet
level are computed directly from the wavelet coefficients at
each level. Fig. 5(b) is the power waveform that is the
product of the and pair, from which the total average
power can be computed. In Fig. 5(a), the power coefficients
are the products of the current and voltage wavelet coefficient
pairs registered at the same level and time. This is based on
(14). The figure indicates significant energy at level 3.
Table III compares with results of the power measurement
among FFT, IIR and polyphase filtering
and Beylkin’s 18-length FIR filtering methods. Power at each
frequency can be computed based on magnitudes and angles
resulting from FFT analysis of the voltage and current data.
Using the proposed power (14), the power of each wavelet
level can be calculated very easily. The results of the FFT
power computation are set as a reference and compared with
the results of the different type of wavelet filtering schemes.
Considering the wavelet level comparison, the results of FFT
and IIR are similar. Level includes the fundamental
and shows main positive power while the maximum negative
power happens at level 3. Table III also shows that IIR
filtering schemes are more accurate than typical FIR filtering
schemes. The relative errors indicate that all of the wavelet-
based approaches more closely match time-domain reference
than the FFT.
YOON AND DEVANEY: POWER MEASUREMENT USING THE WAVELET TRANSFORM
Fig. 4. Wavelet transform of the current data of one cycle (64 point) using
IIR (L = 6) polyphase filter banks. (The ratio of level 23 and the others
is 1 : 5.)
Fig. 5. Power coefficient graph of one cycle (64 point) using IIR (L = 6)
polyphase filter banks. (The ratio of level 23 and the others is 1 : 200.)
TABLE III
POWER MEASUREMENTS USING WAVELET COEFFICIENTS
VI. CONCLUSION
Power and rms measurements are performed on two sets
of periodic data using the proposed wavelet-based algorithms.
The first is the simulated data and the second is the actual
phase voltage and current data from a power system. Steady-
state data are used in the evaluation so the individual subband
powers could be compared with Fourier Transform derived
results.
1209
For the simulated data, the entries in Table II labeled TRUE
are derived from the analytic functions used to generate the –
transient point data and agree to the precision cited. This test
demonstrates that both the Beylkin and IIR polyphase filters
are in good agreement with the reference for the total rms
and power measurements. However the individual subband
rms and power contributions of the IIR filter agree better
than the FIR from a maximum relative error perspective.
This improvement is attributable to the filter’s sharper roll-off
characteristics.
In the test on the actual power system data, the error shown
at the bottom row of Table III is shown relative to the mean
of the – products over the power system cycle. IIR
filter proves superior in total power measurement agreement
and its individual subband powers most nearly matches those
obtained from the Fourier transform. This again demonstrates
the filters have better selectivity. The procession shown does
not reflect that the measurement accuracy as all approaches
used the same set of time samples. Thus, the procession
represents the relative errors introduced by the algorithm itself.
The wavelet-based power measurement algorithms, which
are developed and tested, indicate the distribution of power
and rms with respect to the individual subbands. The subbands
retain the time frequency localization property of the wavelets.
REFERENCES
[1] I. Daubechies, Ten Lectures on Wavelets. Philadelphia, PA: SIAM,
1992.
[2] A. N. Akansu and M. J. T. Smith, Subband and Wavelet Transforms
Design and Application. Norwell, MA: Kluwer, 1996.
[3] G. String and T. Nguyen, Wavelets and Filter Banks. Cambridge, MA:
Wellesley-Cambridge Press, 1997.
[4] M. Vetterli and J. Kovacevic, Wavelets and Subband Coding. Engle-
wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1995.
[5] IEEE Working Group on Nonsinusoidal Situations, “Practical definition
for powers in systems with nonsinusoidal waveforms and unbalanced
loads: A discussion,” IEEE Trans. Power Delivery, vol. 11, pp. 79–101,
Jan. 1996.
[6] D. C. Robertson, O. I. Camps, J. S. Mayer, and W. B. Gish, “Wavelets
and electromagnetic power system transients,” IEEE Trans. Power
Delivery, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 1050–1058, Apr. 1996.
[7] S. Santoso, E. J. Powers, W. M. Grandy, and P. Hofmann, “Power
quality assessment via wavelet transform analysis,” IEEE Trans. Power
Delivery, vol. 11, pp. 924–930, Apr. 1996.
[8] M. J. T. Smith and S. L. Eddins, “Analysis/synthesis techniques for
subband image coding,” IEEE Trans. Acoust. Speech, Signal Processing,
vol. 38, pp. 1446–1456, Aug. 1990.
[9] D. L. Donoho, Software Packet “WaveLab version .701” of Matlab
Program, Jan. 1996.
[10] W.-K. Yoon, “Power measurements via the wavelet transform,” Ph.D.
dissertation, Univ. Missouri, Columbia, Dec. 1998.
Weon-Ki Yoon was born in Seoul, Korea. He
received the B.S. degree in electronic engineering
from Hanyang University, Seoul, in 1986 and the
M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering
from the University of Missouri, Columbia, in 1995
and 1998, respectively.
He had industrial experiences with Dae-Young
Electronic Co., Korea, from 1986 to 1989, in design-
ing analog and digital telecommunication systems
and LG Electronic Co., Korea, from 1989 to 1991 in
satellite TV receiver design. He has been a Research
Assistant on digital power metering at the University of Missouri, Columbia,
since 1996.
1210 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 47, NO. 5, OCTOBER 1998

Michael J. Devaney (S’60–M’64) was born in St.

Louis, MO. He received the B.S.E.E. degree from
the University of Missouri, Rolla, in 1964 and the
M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering
from the University of Missouri, Columbia, in 1967
and 1971, respectively.
He worked for the Bendix Corporation (now
Allied-Signal) from 1964 to 1967 in automated test
equipment design and joined the faculty of the
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department,
University of Missouri, Columbia, in 1969, where
he is now an Associate Professor. From 1974 to 1979, he was an Investigator
at the John M. Dalton Research Center, where he worked on biotelemetry
and instrumentation for the study of microcirculation. From 1980 to 1988, he
was the Undergraduate Program Director for Computer Engineering, and in
1987 he became affiliated with the Power Electronics Research Center and
served as its Associate Director in 1989 and 1990. He has published 12 journal
articles and 29 conference papers, and for the past ten years has been engaged
in research in power metering and power quality measurement supported by
Square D.
Dr. Devaney was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine
and Biology News in 1978–1979.