Characterization of Power Quality Assets through Wavelets

Owing to very rapid growth in electronics and technology, it has become very essential to maintain power quality at the consumer end. Since power quality has vast no of assets, mainly important and frequently occurring disturbances are considered in this paper. Power quality is mainly defined by disturbances associated with voltage. However, the voltage disturbances can be classified based on the duration of occurrence and magnitude. In most of cases, it is very difficult to identify the type of disturbance which is very essential for the operation of the circuit breaker because the circuit breakers should be operated based on severity of the disturbance and its effect on the loads. Power quality (PQ) disturbance recognition is the foundation of power quality monitoring and analysis. Though many analyzing tools exist for characterizing the disturbances, wavelets provide a better methodology. Wavelets have an added advantage of providing time and frequency information of a given signal.