An Orthogonal Design of Experiments for Accurately Estimating Harmonics of Periodic Signals at Low Frequencies

The lack of synchronization between the sampling rate and the signal frequency is the main source of leakage errors in the harmonic analysis of periodic signals performed by means of digital techniques. An algorithm for accurately measuring the harmonic parameters of low-frequency, arbitrary voltage signals without using synchronization circuits was published recently. It is shown that the algorithm is an alternative orthogonal design of experiments for the problem of fitting a linear trigonometric model to integrating digital voltmeter data. This was experimentally confirmed in recent comparison of the proposed method with a synchronous synthesizing and sampling system. The harmonic magnitudes as a percentage of the fundamental measured by both methods differ by less than one part in 10⁶. The algorithm can be advantageously used in almost any kind of low-frequency ac applications where two arbitrary voltage signals measured by two voltmeters are to be compared for harmonic magnitude and phase shift.