Power Systems Model Developments for Power Qality Monitoring : Application to Fundamental Frequency and Unbalance Estimation

Renewable energy, electricity and smart grids are core subjects as they have great environmental and societal impacts. Thus, generating, transporting and managing electric energy, i.e., power, still continue to drive a growing interest. In order to properly achieve these goals, several locks must be removed. Beyond issues related to the distribution architecture, the formalization of models, sizing tools, features and indicators, constraints and criteria, decentralized generation and energy management, power quality is central for the whole grid’s reliability. Disturbances affect the power quality and can cause serious impact on other equipment connected to the grid. The work of this thesis is part of this context and focuses on the development of models, indicators, and signal processing methods for power quality monitoring in time-varying power distribution systems.This thesis analyzes the power quality including several well-known features and their relevance. Power system models and signal processing methods for estimating their parameters are investigated for the purpose of real-time monitoring, diagnostic and control tasks under various operating conditions. Among all, the fundamental frequency is one of the most important parameters of a power distribution system. Indeed, its value which is supposed to be a constant varies continuously and reflects the dynamic availability of electric power. The fundamental frequency can also be affected by renewable energy generation and by nasty synchronization of some devices. Moreover, the power absorbed by loads or produced by sources is generally different from one phase to the other one. Obviously, most of the existing residential and industrial electrical installations with several phases work under unbalanced conditions. Identifying the symmetrical components is therefore an efficient way to quantify the imbalance between the phases of a grid. New state-space representations of power systems are proposed for estimating the fundamental frequency and for identifying the voltage symmetrical components of unbalanced three-phase power systems. A first state-space representation is developed by supposing the fundamental frequency to be known or to be calculated by another estimator. In return, it provides other parameters and characteristics from the power system. Another original state-space model is introduced which does not require the fundamental frequency. Here, one state variable is a function of the frequency which can thus be deduced. Furthermore this new state-space model is perfectly are able to represent a three-phase power system in both balanced and unbalanced conditions. This not the case of lots of existing models. The advantage of the proposed state-space representation is that it gives directly access to physical parameters of the system, like the frequency and the amplitude and phase values of the voltage symmetrical components. Power systems parameters can thus be estimated in real-time by using the new state-space with an online estimation process like an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). The digital implementation of the proposed methods presents small computational requirement, elegant recursive properties, and optimal estimations with Gaussian error statistics.The methods have been implemented and validated through various tests respecting real technical constraints and operating conditions. The methods can be integrated in active power filtering schemes or load-frequency control strategies to monitor power systems and to compensate for electrical disturbances.