Accurate tracking of harmonic signals in VSC-HVDC systems using PSO based unscented transformation

This paper presents the estimation of harmonics in a voltage source converter based HVDC (VSC-HVDC) system for designing AC side filters. The extended Kalman filter (EKF) is well known for estimating amplitude, phase, frequency, and harmonic content of a signal corrupted with noise. However, the EKF algorithm suffers from instability due to linearization and costly calculation of Jacobian matrices, and its performance deteriorates when the signal model is highly nonlinear. This paper, therefore, proposes an unscented Kalman filter (UKF) to overcome these difficulties of linearization and derivative calculations for robust tracking of harmonics in VSC-HVDC system. The model and measurement error covariance matrices Q and R along with the UKF parameters are selected using a modified particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. To circumvent the problem of premature convergence and local minima, a dynamically varying inertia weight based on the variance of the population fitness is used. This results in a better local and global searching ability of the particles, which improves the convergence of the velocity and better accuracy of the UKF parameters. Various simulation results for harmonic signals corrupted with noise obtained from VSC-HVDC system reveal significant improvement in noise rejection and speed of convergence and accuracy.

► Unscented Kalman filters (UKF) produce accurate tracking of harmonics in noise.
► These filters are more robust than extended Kalman filters (EKF).
► For better estimation UKF parameters are optimized using particle swarm optimization.
► Optimized UKF is used for estimation of harmonics in VSC-HVDC systems.