DSP for the real time detection of power quality surge transients

Power-quality events are of increasing concern for the economy because today's equipment, particularly computers and automated manufacturing devices, is highly sensitive to such imperfections. Metering technologies and communications systems have advanced to enable the development of DSP-based sensors. Power system surges, based on waveform shapes, can be classified into “oscillatory transient” and “impulsive transient” This paper investigates the challenges and possibilities in the development of a DSP power-quality event detection algorithm. It provides the real-time detection of transients without requiring a large amount of memory. It is presented its advantages as a simple and robust algorithm, over others well known proposal. Finally, the analysis of its performance in the time domain is addressed on a low-cost DSP board.