Transient disturbance detection for power systems with a general likelihood ratio test

A voltage/current transient typically caused by islanding and switching operations is treated as an adverse phenomenon that degrades power quality, and it may cause damage to electrical equipment. Therefore, a reliable system should effectively detect and monitor a transient disturbance. In this paper, the transient detection problem is formulated as a binary hypothesis test: normal signal (null) vs. transient (alternative). The sampled data is described by a sinusoid under the null hypothesis, while a sum of damped sinusoids is utilized to model the alternative one. As no prior knowledge is imposed on complex amplitudes, frequencies, or damping factors in signal modeling, the general likelihood ratio test (GLRT) is employed to fulfill the task. To reduce computational complexity, the maximum likelihood estimator is replaced by ESPRIT for parameter estimation. Probability of detection of 0.98 is achieved at a SNR of 27dB and probability of false alarm of 0.0005.