Several variants of Kalman Filter algorithm for power system harmonic estimation

•LET-KF algorithm is proposed in this paper for harmonic estimation in power system.•LET-KF algorithm is applied to estimate harmonics for static and dynamic signals.•Proposed algorithm is validated with experimental data in real time environment.•Performance of the proposed LET-KF algorithm is evaluated in presence of noise.•LET-KF algorithm outperforms others in terms of accuracy and computational time.

This paper presents the maiden application of a variant of Kalman Filter algorithm known as Local Ensemble Transform based Kalman Filter (LET-KF) for power system harmonic estimation. The proposed algorithm is applied for estimating the harmonic parameters of a power signal containing harmonics, sub-harmonics, inter-harmonics in presence of white Gaussian noise. These algorithms are applied and tested for both stationary as well as dynamic signals containing harmonics. The LET-KF algorithm reported in this paper is compared with the earlier reported Kalman Filter based algorithms like Kalman Filter (KF) and Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) algorithms for harmonic estimation. The proposed algorithm is found superior than the reported algorithm for its improved efficiency and accuracy in terms of simplicity and computational features, since there are less multiplicative operations, which reduces the rounding errors. It is also less expensive as it reduces the requirement of storing large matrices, such as the Kalman gain matrix used in other KF based methods. Practical validation is carried out with experimentation of the algorithms with the real time data obtained from a large paper industry. Comparison of the results obtained with KF, EnKF and LET-KF algorithms reveals that the proposed LET-KF algorithm is the best in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency for harmonic estimation.