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Dominant Mode Identification for Low Frequency Oscillations of Power Systems based on Prony Algorithm
Lan Ding, Ancheng Xue, Member, IEEE, Fukun Han, JinLi, Maohai Wang, Tianshu Bi, Senior Member, IEEE, and Jinping Wang
mode for the whole power system. Thus, its adaptation is poor as the large-scale of power system contains a lot of uncertainties such as load model, so it is difficult for on line application. The other is measured data based method. The measured data based method, only using the measured data, is independent of the power system model. However, its adaptation only depends on the speed and accuracy of data acquisition and data processing method. On the other hand, with the development of Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) and wide-area measurement system (WAMS), which could timely provide voltage, current, power and other information, on-line extraction of mode information from the measured data becomes possible [2-5]. Currently, the popular measured data based methods for LFO are the Fourier algorithm, Prony algorithm, Wavelet algorithm. Among them, the Fourier transform and Wavelet transform are quite difficult to extract the signals attenuation. While the Prony algorithm, using a linear combination of exponential to fit interval sampling data, has the ability to extract the oscillation information such as signal attenuation. Furthermore, ref. [6-7] has compared Prony algorithm with Fourier analysis and eigenvalue analysis, which shows its advantages for LFO analysis. In implementation, the order of Prony algorithm is directly corresponding to the number of the oscillation modes. Reference [8-11] have proposed the approaches to determine the order such as according to time-domain fitting accuracy, the least-squares approximation, singular value decomposition (SVD) method, etc. However, in the application of the Prony method, much more than one mode together with its relevant parameters could be obtained. As mentioned earlier, how to identify the dominant mode which plays the largest role when LFO occurs is a very important problem. Regarding the above fact, this paper focuses on the identification method for dominant mode of LFO based on Prony algorithm in WAMS. It proposes the Prony algorithm based method to identify the dominant mode. The presented method contains three steps. The first step is pre-processing of Prony analysis result, the second step is the dominant mode identification, and the third step is the grouping of different generators according individual generators frequency and phase information. In the data pre-processing step, the main method is the order determination which adopts the advanced methods existing in references. In the dominant mode

Abstract--Once the power system low frequency oscillation occurs, the operators desire to find out the dominant mode LFO so as to take measures to suspend it. This paper proposes an identification method for dominant mode of LFO based on Prony algorithm in wide-area measurement system (WAMS). The presented method contains three steps, the first step is preprocessing of Prony analysis result, the second step is the dominant mode identification, and the third step is the grouping of different generators according individual generators frequency and phase information. Among the dominant mode identification step, three indexes are proposed to select the dominant mode. The first one is the ratio of amplitude and damping ratio; the second one is mode energy and the third one is the amplitude of sinusoidal decay mode after a period of oscillation. The simulation results in a two-area-four-machine benchmark system and 10 generator 39-bus New England system by DSATools demonstrate that the proposed method has strong adaptability to noise, i.e., the method has good performance of identification. Index Termslow frequency oscillation (LFO), dominant mode identification, Prony algorithm, DSATools.

I. INTRODUCTION

ITH the development and interconnection of power system, low frequency oscillation becomes an important factor which restricts the power transfer capability between systems, it also implies the undesired the security and stability level of power grid. Once the power system low frequency oscillation occurs, the operators desire to find out the dominant mode LFO and then take measures to suspend it. Generally, there are two methods to find the dominant mode for LFO. One is eigenvalue analysis based method [1]. The eigenvalue based method requires the establishment of
Lan DING, Ancheng XUE, Jin LI and Tianshu BI are with the Key Laboratory of Power System Protection and Dynamic Security Monitoring and Control, Ministry of Education ,School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, North China Electric power University, Beijing 102206,P.R.China (E-mail: dinlan_1@163.com; acxue@ncepu.edu.cn). Fukun HAN and Maohai WANG are with North China Power Dispatching Center, Beijing, 100053,P.R.China. Jinping WANG is with North China Electric Power Research Institute Co.Ltd ,Beijing 100045,P.R.China This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 50707035, 50920105705 and 50837002, in part by the 111 project (B08013), in part by the National Program on Key Basic Research Project (973 Program) under Grant 2009CB219704, in part by the Doctoral Foundation of NCEPU under Grants 200822003.

978-1-4244-8081-4/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE

identification step, three indexes, constructed according to different physical meaning of energy are proposed to determine the dominant mode. The first one is the ratio of amplitude and damping ratio; the second one is mode energy and the third one is the amplitude of sinusoidal decay mode after a period of oscillation. The generators grouping is achieved by calculating the frequency and phase difference with the reference. Finally, the presented identification method has been applied to two-area-four-machine benchmark system and 10 generator 39-bus New England system. The result of comparison with Eigenvalue analysis by DSATools demonstrates its validity and the performances of three indexes are also discussed. Further, the noise analysis shows that he proposed method has strong adaptability to noise, i.e, the presented method can be applied to practical power systems. II. PRONY ALGORITHM This section first briefly introduces the Prony algorithm and then describes the parameter setting of Prony algorithm when applied into the PMU data involving LFO of power system. A. Prony algorithm review Supposing the sample signals y(0), , y(M 1) are approximated by the following combination of the exponential components.
n ( y n) = ak zk (n = 0,1,..., M 1) k=1 p

By minimizing

M 1 n= p

( n)

, the coefficients b1 , b2 ,

bp can

be obtained with the following equation. R(1,1) R(1, p) R(1,0) R(2,0) R(2,1) R(2, p) R( p,1) R( p, p ) R( p,0) where
R( k , j ) =
M 1 n= p

1 0 b 1 = 0 bp 0

(8)

y (n j ) y (n k )

(9)

where k , j = 0,1, 2, p . Furthermore, with the equation (1), the following equation can be obtained.
0 z1 M 1 z1

M 1 zp z0 p

a1 y (0) = a p y ( M 1)

(10)

where
y ( n) ( y n) = p ( bk y n k ) k =1 0n p p +1 n M 1

(11)

(1) (2-a)

Thus, the procedure of the Prony algorithm is first obtaining the parameter bk (k = 1, , p) by the equation (8), and obtaining the zk (k = 1, , p) by equation (5) and then obtaining the coefficient ak (k = 1, , p) with equation (10). B. Parameter setting for low frequency oscillation The choice of sampling frequency and order is the first task of Prony analysis. Low sampling frequency may easily lead to spectrum aliasing, while high sampling frequency may cost more computation, even affect the accuracy of parameter estimation, thus the sampling frequency 10Hz is adopted in for the LFO as its frequency is usually less than 2.5Hz. The determination of the order for the Prony algorithm is one difficult problem. This paper adopts the SVD based order determination method [10], as it has a lot of advantages [11]. Therefore, once the parameters the zk and ak (k = 1, , p) is obtained for the data involving LFO, then the information of the LFO can be obtained as follows: Ak = ak / 2 k = arctan(Im(ak ) / Re( ak )) f s / 2 (12) k = 1, , p k = Re(ln( zk )) f s f k = Im(ln( zk )) f s / 2 In addition, as the frequency of LFO for power system is often less than 2.5Hz, therefore, the mode parameter should be chosen which frequency in equation (12) is between 0.1Hz to 2.5Hz.

ak = Ak exp( jk ) zk = exp[(k + 2 fk )t]

(2-b) where p is the order, t is sampling interval, Ak , k , k and fk are amplitude, phase, attenuation factor and frequency. The objective of the Prony algorithm is to calculated the parameter ( ak and zk . Here, y n) is the approximated value of y(n) , and the error can be described as follows. (3) e(n) = y(n) y(n) , (n = 0,1,..., M 1) Based on equation (1), a constant coefficient linear differential equation for the approximated values can be obtained as follows [10].
y (n) = bk y ( n k )
k =1 p

n = p, , M 1

(4)

The Prony polar points zk (k = 1, , p) are the solution of the following equation.
1 + bk z k = 0
k =1 p

(5)

Furthermore, with equation (3) and (4), the following error equation can be obtained.
y (n) = bk y (n k ) + (n) n = p, , M 1
k =1 p

(6)

where the error (n) satisfies the following equation.

(n) = bk e(n k )
k =0 p

(7)

III. INDEXES FOR DOMINANT MODE IDENTIFICATION AND PHILOSOPHY OF GENERATOR GROUPING Based on the Prony analysis result, this section first presents three different indexes which could be used to identify the dominant mode with the philosophy of energy, and then gives out the method of generator grouping, which is based on the dominant mode.

reference i ,k ref can be obtained, and then, according to the relative phase, the generators involved in the dominant oscillation could be divided to two groups, one is the positive group, whose relative phase a between -90 and 90 degree, and the others are divided into reverse group. IV. PRACTICAL DOMINANT MODE IDENTIFICATION

A. Energy based indexes With the philosophy presented in section III, the steps of the practical dominant mode identification and generation With the Prony analysis, the signal containing LFO could be decomposed to different modes (different mode is grouping based on Prony analysis with PMU data are shown corresponding to different frequency). Naturally, the mode in Fig 1. (certain frequency oscillation) with the largest energy is regarded as the dominant mode for LFO. With this philosophy, this paper proposes three indexes to determine the dominant mode of LFO. The three indexes, which are based on energy concepts and Prony algorithm, are as follows: (1) C1 = A / , that is the ratio of amplitude and damping ratio, = / 2 + (2 f )2 ; (2) C2 = E , where E is the mode energy, that is
Ek =
M 1 n=0

2 n ak z k

k = 1, 2,

p;

C 3 = Ae f , that is the amplitude of sinusoidal decay mode after a period of oscillation Index C2 is the absolute energy of the mode and it is related with the initial amplitude. While C1 and C3 account for the impact of decay, i.e., the greater of the decaying rate, the less of the index, and also the less possibility of dominant. In detail, index C1 accounts for the decay in a general way, i.e., using the combined effect of mode energy and damping, and index C3 uses the residual energy after a period of oscillation to account for the decay.
(3)

B. Generators Grouping with Prony Algorithm In practical, in low frequency oscillation, different generators may belong to different groups, and one group of generator oscillated against another. On the other hand, with the application of Prony algorithm to the generators PMU data containing LFO, the data could be decomposed to different oscillated modes. Naturally, the modes corresponding to different generator with the similar frequency are involving in the same oscillation mode. Then, with the concept of the dominant mode, the generator could be grouped. In detail, for any generator node, if its measured data contains a mode whose frequency is near to the dominant mode, then, this generator is involved in the dominant mode oscillation. Here the near means that the ratio of the absolute value of frequency difference between two modes and the dominant mode frequency is less than a setting value. Furthermore, while the generators involved in the dominant oscillation are identified, the dominant mode which holding the largest value of Cn (n=1, 2, 3) is set as the reference, i.e., ref = k * , then, the relative phase with respect to the

Fig. 1. Dominant mode identification flow chart

Specifically, the steps of the Dominant mode identification and generators grouping are as follows: Step1: After the application of the Prony algorithm to the PMU data measured at different generators, the modes whose frequency are between 0.1 Hz and 2.5 Hz are selected. Step2: In all selected modes, the mode (frequency) which has the largest of Cn (n=1, 2, 3) is regarded as the dominant mode 1 (frequency F) of the LFO. Here, Cn (n=1, 2, 3) is the identification index presented in section III.A. Step3: For any generator, if it exist a mode with frequency Fk, which satisfies the following eqution. (13) | Fk / F 1|< Fthd Where, Fthd is a setting threshold, this generator is involved in the oscillation mode 1. Generally, Fthd is less than 10%. Step4: The positive group and reverse group is obtained by calculating the relative phase with the reference set as the mode with the largest Cn. Step5: If all modes belonged to mode 1 have been found. Then, the second dominant mode and its related generators

could be identified with the application of step 2 to step 4 to the residual modes. Step6: The identification is finished until the ratio of value of index for the obtained dominant mode m and dominant mode 1 is less than threshold Cthd, which shows that all dangerous low frequency oscillation modes have been found, Generally, Cthd is about 10%.~30% . V. SIMULATION RESULTS

three indexes C1~C3, to the relative power angles, which taking the center of inertia power angle as reference, simulation result in Table II & III can be obtained.
TABLE II IDENTIFICATION RESULT OF POWER ANGLE BASED ON C1
Mode Generator 3

or C2
Phase () -156.98 17.41 28.9 -158.22

Freq.(Hz) 0.6259 0.6259 0.6259 0.6259

Damping ratio (%) 3.123 3.122 3.125 3.124

A. Four-machine two-area system This subsection presented the simulation result based on the benchmark four-machine two-area system, as shown in Fig 2. the systems parameters are same as ref. [12]. Assuming the system experienced an instantaneous three phase short-circuit in the middle of one loop between node 7 and node 8. The simulation lasts 20s. The Eigenvalue analysis result by DSATools is shown in Table I.

1 2 4

The symbol represents the generator which has the max value of Cn in dominant mode oscillation.
TABLE IDENTIFICATION RESULT OF POWER ANGLE BASED ON C3
Mode Generator 3 1

Freq.(Hz) 0.6259 0.6259 0.6259 0.6259 1.0603 1.0609 1.0652 1.0867

Damping ratio (%) 3.123 3.122 3.125 3.124 11.76 11.92 13.09 13.04

Phase () -156.98 17.41 28.9 -158.22 100.83 -80.18 -27.64 171.4

1 2 4 2

1 3 4

Fig. 2 The 4-generator two-area system TABLE I THE EIGENVALUE ANALYSIS RESULT
Real -0.7931 -0.8041 -0.12 Imaginary 6.6438 6.8442 3.9268
1.057Hz mode 0.8 0.6 0.4 Participation factor 0.2 0 -0.2 -0.4 -0.6 -0.8 -1 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 Generator number 1 2 3 4

Freq.(Hz) 1.057 1.089 0.625

1.089Hz mode

Damping ratio(%) 11.85 11.67 3.06

0.625Hz mode

Fig. 3 The participation factor of each mode

The participation factors of each mode which are normalized against the largest participation calculated by DSATools are shown in Fig 3. The positive and negative of participation factors represent different groupings. By apply dominant mode identification method, using the

Table II& Table III show that, with the indexes C1~C3, the identification results based Prony method show that four generators contain a mode close to 0.625Hz, which is also consisting with eigenvalue based analysis, as shown in Fig.3 and Table I. all four generators have greater participation factors in 0.625Hz mode. Furthermore, the dominant generator determined by the energy based index Cn matches the generator with the largest participation factor through eigenvalue analysis. On the other hand, the comparisons of generators phases in Table II show that 0.625Hz mode is the inter-area oscillation mode between area 1 and area 2. This is in accordance with the sign of participation factors in Fig 3. Similarly, the 1.057Hz mode in Table I matches the mode 2 with the C3 in Table III and the phase comparison illustrates mode 2 is the local mode between generator 1 and generator 2, between generator 3 and generator 4.Actually, the second mode is far less dangerous than the first dominant mode. To account for the impact of noise in the measured signal, the 2% amplitude random noises are added in the signals according to PMU error characteristic [13-14]. The dominant mode identifications by three indexes to the signal with noises are listed in Table IV. Table IV shows that the first dominant mode is the same by different indexes under noisy conditions and impact of the noise is quite light. Although the results of C3 still include two modes, but the parameter of the second mode is obviously

wrong due to noise. Of course, it is able to cope with the spurious mode by adjusting the value of Cthd. Therefore, three different indexes can be correctly applied to the dominant mode identification for low frequency oscillations and have strong adaptability to noise.
TABLE IV IDENTIFICATION RESULT OF POWER ANGLE CONTAINING 2% NOISE BASED ON C1 C2 AND C3
Mode Generator 3 1

DSATools is shown in Table V.By applying dominant mode identification method, with the three indexes C1~C3 on the active power signals, the simulation result for the first dominant mode, also the same part of identification results, is shown in Table VI. The symbol represents the reference dominant node

TABLE VI IDENTIFICATION RESULT OF ACTIVE POWER BASED ON C1~C3

Mode Generator 39

Freq.(Hz) 0.6260 0.6251 0.6264 0.6258

Damping ratio (%) 3.204 3.179 3.082 3.265

Phase () -157.25 19.23 27.79 -158.51

Freq.(Hz) 0.4960 0.4960 0.4968 0.4955 0.4970 0.4951 0.4923 0.4919 0.4959 0.4950

Damping ratio (%) 4.764 4.206 3.940 4.065 3.829 3.960 3.461 3.991 4.305 4.195

Phase () 104.35 -70.29 -74.12 -71.16 -76.52 -74.17 -66.78 -66.75 -70.50 -70.48

1 2 4

30 31 32 1 33 34 35 36 37 38

B. New England 10-machine 39-bus system This subsection presents the simulation result in New England 10-machine 39-bus in order to study the adaptability of the proposed method in the multi-machine system,, as shown in Fig 4 and the specific parameters are obtained from reference [12].
G
2 1 30

37 25 26 27 38 3 18 15 17 16 21 28 29

Similarly, using dominant mode identification method, by three indexes C1~C3, to the speed signals, the simulation result for the first dominant mode is shown Table VII.
TABLE VII IDENTIFICATION RESULT OF SPEED BASED ON C1~C3
Mode Generator 35 30 31 32 Freq.(Hz) 0.4951 0.4970 0.4983 0.4968 0.4957 0.4942 0.4903 0.4958 0.4963 0.4937 Damping ratio (%) 4.581 3.677 4.025 3.587 3.912 4.055 4.100 3.797 4.112 4.289 18.20 19.49 16.36 18.98 19.26 21.69 26.27 21.37 19.48 -163.32 Phase ()

G
39

G
4 9 5 7 8 31 6 13 12 11 10 32 19 20 34 33 22 35 14 24 36 23

33 34 36 37 38 39

Fig. 4 The single line diagram of New England 10-generator 39-bus system TABLE V THE EIGENVALUE ANALYSIS RESULT
Real -0.1354 -0.1629 -0.1822 -0.1713 -0.1554 -0.1581 -0.1562 -0.1697 -0.153 Imaginary 3.4154 10.8894 11.2144 10.2768 9.6202 8.9598 5.794 7.5683 6.9716 Freq.(Hz) ratio(%) 0.5436 1.7331 1.7848 1.6356 1.5311 1.426 0.9221 1.2045 1.1096 3.96 1.5 1.62 1.67 1.62 1.76 2.7 2.24 2.19 Damping

Disturbance added to the system as follows: instantaneous single phase short-circuit in tie line between node 21 and node 22.The simulation lasts 16s. The eigenvalue analysis result by

Comparing Table VI, VII with Table V, it shows that the dominant mode of active power signals and speed signals identified by proposed method accords with 0.5436 Hz mode obtained by the eigenvalue based analysis. Thus, the proposed identification method based on Prony algorithm is able to correctly obtain the dominant modes of low frequency oscillations. Comparisons of identification results of three indexes show that the fist or the second dominant mode is generally the same whether the signal containing noise or not; the following modes may appear the differences, but all of them are playing a very small role in oscillation. However, it is able to achieve the unity results through modifying the threshold or choosing the common modes.

VI. CONCLUSION Prony algorithm has advantages to obtain the oscillation information, but the results usually contain more than one mode. This paper proposes an identification method for dominant mode of low frequency oscillation based on Prony algorithm in WAMS. Three indexes based on energy concept the ratio of amplitude and damping ratiomode energy the amplitude of sinusoidal decay mode after a period of oscillation are studied. The results of comparison with Eigenvalue analysis by DSATools demonstrate the validity of method. The identification results of three indexes show that the first dominant mode is generally the same, but following modes may appear differences. However, it is to achieve the unity results through modifying the threshold or choosing the common modes. Further, the noise analysis shows that the proposed method has strong adaptability to noise. REFERENCES
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