Transforming Conventional Waveform Measurements Into Synchro-Waveforms: A Data-Driven Method for Event Signature Alignment and Synchronization Operator Estimation

Abstract

A series of methodologies are proposed to transform conventional waveform measurements from legacy power quality meters into synchro-waveforms. This study is motivated by the presence of thousands of legacy power quality meters in operation worldwide that provide event-triggered waveform measurements but lack time-synchronization among their data. Consequently, the waveform measurements from these legacy meters cannot be directly used as synchro-waveforms, limiting their applicability in the promising synchro-waveform applications that have been introduced in the literature in recent years. We address this issue without requiring legacy power quality meters to be equipped with GPS receivers or other time-synchronization hardware. Our data-driven methods operate in two steps: first, they perform optimization-based event signature alignment, and then they use the results to estimate a synchronization operator between any two legacy meters. The proposed methods are accurate, robust, and computationally efficient. All case studies presented in this paper are based on real-world waveform measurements.