What is Disturbances (Power Quality Problems)

In recent years, power quality (PQ) has become an increasingly major concern for both electric utilities and the end users. Accordingly, the electrical engineering community has to deal with the analysis, diagnosis, and solution of PQ issues using system approach rather than handling these issues as individual problems. This chapter describes the analysis of PQ using advanced signal processing tools represented in Hilbert and wavelet transforms (HT-WT) and artificial intelligence tools represented in artificial neural network and support vector machine (ANN-SVM) for detection and classification of power quality disturbances, respectively. These techniques were successfully simulated using LABVIEW software capabilities. The results of simulation indicate that the signal processing techniques are effective mechanisms to detect and classify power quality disturbances. At the end, the combination of WT as a tool of detection and features extraction with SVM as a classifier tool resulted as the best combination for PQ monitoring system.