Hybrid signal processing and machine intelligence techniques for detection, quantification and classification of power quality disturbances

This paper presents an advanced signal processing technique known as S-transform (ST) to detect and quantify various power quality (PQ) disturbances. ST is also utilized to extract some useful features of the disturbance signal. The excellent time–frequency resolution characteristic of the ST makes it an attractive candidate for analysis of power system disturbance signals. The number of features required in the proposed approach is less than that of the wavelet transform (WT) for identification of PQ disturbances. The features extracted by using ST are used to train a support vector machine (SVM) classifier for automatic classification of the PQ disturbances. Since the proposed methodology can reduce the features of disturbance signal to a great extent without losing its original property, it efficiently utilizes the memory space and computation time of the processor. Eleven types of PQ disturbances are considered for the classification purpose. The simulation results show that the combination of ST and SVM can effectively detect and classify different PQ disturbances.