Harmonic estimation in a power system using a novel hybrid Least Squares-Adaline algorithm

Nowadays many algorithms have been proposed for harmonic estimation in a power system. Most of them deal with this estimation as a totally nonlinear problem. Consequently, these methods either converge slowly, like GA algorithm [U. Qidwai, M. Bettayeb, GA based nonlinear harmonic estimation, IEEE Trans. Power Delivery (December) 1998], or need accurate parameter adjustment to track dynamic and abrupt changes of harmonics amplitudes, like adaptive Kalman filter (KF) [Steven Liu, An adaptive Kalman filter for dynamic estimation of harmonic signals, in: 8th International Conference On Harmonics and Quality of Power, ICHQP’98, Athens, Greece, October 14–16, 1998]. In this paper a novel hybrid approach, based on the decomposition of the problem into a linear and a nonlinear problem, is proposed. A linear estimator, i.e., Least Squares (LS), which is simple, fast and does not need any parameter tuning to follow harmonics amplitude changes, is used for amplitude estimation and an adaptive linear combiner called ‘Adaline’, which is very fast and very simple is used to estimate phases of harmonics. An improvement in convergence and processing time is achieved using this algorithm. Moreover, better performance in online tracking of dynamic and abrupt changes of signals is the result of applying this method.