Joint Voltage and Phase Unbalance Detector for Three Phase Power Systems

This letter develops a fast detection algorithm for voltage and phase unbalance in three phase power systems. It is suitable for real time applications since the required observation length is one cycle. It is shown to successfully detect small unbalance conditions at low SNRs. Its detection performance is shown to outperform traditional detectors that rely on changes in only a subset of positive, negative and zero sequence voltages. Unbalance detection is formulated as a hypothesis test under a framework of detection theory and solved by applying a generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT). We first obtain an approximate maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) of the system frequency and then use it to substitute the true unknown frequency in the GLRT. A closed form expression is provided to detect unbalance conditions. Theoretical derivations are supported by simulations.