A new reactive, distortion and non-active power measurement method for nonstationary waveforms using wavelet packet transform

The definitions of power components that are contained in the IEEE Standard 1459-2000 [IEEE Std. 1459-2000, Definitions for the measurement of electric quantities under sinusoidal, non-sinusoidal, balanced or unbalanced conditions, 2000] are based on the Fourier transform (FT) which is suitable only for the case of stationary waveforms. However, for nonstationary waveforms, the FT produces large errors. Therefore, the power components based on this transform become inaccurate. A new approach based on the wavelet packet transform (WPT) for defining these power components is developed in this paper. The advantages of using the wavelet transform are that it can accurately represent and measure nonstationary waveforms, providing uniform frequency bands while preserving both time and frequency information. In addition, this paper addresses the problem of choosing the most appropriate mother wavelet for power components measurements. The results of applying both approaches to stationary and nonstationary waveforms show that the currently used definitions according to the IEEE Standard 1459-2000 result in large errors for the case of nonstationary waveforms while the proposed approach (WPT based) gives more accurate results in this situation.