Application of the Variational Mode Decomposition for Power Quality Analysis

Harmonics and interharmonics in power systems distort the grid voltage, deteriorate the quality and stability of the power grid. Therefore, rapid and accurate harmonic separation from the grid voltage is crucial to power system. In this article, a variational mode decomposition-based method is proposed to separate harmonics and interharmonics in the grid voltage. The method decomposes the voltage signal into fundamental, harmonic, interharmonic components through the frequency spectrum. An empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and an ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) can be combined with the independent component analysis (ICA) to analyze the harmonics and intherharmonics. By comparing EMD-ICA, EEMD-ICA methods, the proposed method has several advantages: (1) a higher correlation coefficient of all the components is found; (2) it requires much less time to accomplish signal separation; (3) amplitude, frequency, and phase angle are all retained by this method. The results obtained from both synthetic and real-life signals demonstrate the good performance of the proposed method

A Depth-Adaptive Filtering Method for Effective GPR Tree Roots Detection in Tropical Area

This study presents a technique for processing Stepfrequency continuous wave (SFCW) ground penetrating radar (GPR) data to detect tree roots. SFCW GPR is portable and enables precise control of energy levels, balancing depth and resolution trade-offs. However, the high-frequency components of the transmission band suffers from poor penetrating capability and generates noise that interferes with root detection. The proposed time-frequency filtering technique uses a short-time Fourier transform (STFT) to track changes in frequency spectrum density over time. To obtain the filter window, a weighted linear regression (WLR) method is used. By adopting a conversion method that is a variant of the chirp Z-Transform (CZT), the timefrequency window filters out frequency samples that are not of interest when doing the frequency-to-time domain data conversion. The proposed depth-adaptive filter window can selfadjust to different scenarios, making it independent of soil information and effectively determines subsurface tree roots. The technique is successfully validated using SFCW GPR data from actual sites in a tropical area with different soil moisture levels, and the two-dimensional (2D) radar map of subsurface root systems is highly improved compared to existing methods.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figures, Accepted by IEEE TI