A direction finder for power quality disturbances based upon disturbance power and energy

While existing techniques are capable of automatically identifying and classifying various types of distribution-level power quality disturbances, they do not provide any information about the locations of the disturbance sources. This paper shows that it is possible to use sampled voltage and current waveforms to determine on which side of a recording device a disturbance originates. This is accomplished by examining the energy flow and peak instantaneous power for both capacitor energizing and voltage sag disturbances. We demonstrate the technique by testing it on both ATP-generated waveforms and actual field disturbance data. In both cases, we are able to accurately determine on which side of a recording device the disturbance originates. If enough recording devices are available in a network, the individual readings can be collectively used to pinpoint the locations of disturbance sources.