Feature Extraction-Based Method for Voltage Sag Source Location in the Context of Smart Grids

The location of the voltage sag sources corresponds to an important task for the Power Quality area. However, this is not a trivial task due to the need of many monitoring devices. Therefore, with the data management from smart meters installed in distribution feeders, decision support tools that solve this problem become viable. Thus, this paper proposes an algorithm that determines the area where the voltage sag source is located. For this purpose, it was necessary to extract features from smart meters' voltage signals. In the sequence, we analyze the relevance of each feature to establish the most significant of them. In this way, the smart meter could extract these features and send them to the utility. At the utility side, the proposed algorithm will estimate the region where the voltage sag source is located. The location procedure is performed by cross checking the most relevant features and the network topology.