Many power quality engineers are familiar with the concepts related to the power triangle such as real power, reactive power, apparent power and power factor. The construction of the power…
White Papers
Browse our library of power quality technical resources.
27 results in Analyzing Waveforms — Clear
Analyzing Waveforms
Analysis of Capacitor Bank Operation in Waveform Files
Electric utilities use capacitor banks to control power factor and regulate voltage on distribution systems. This paper describes a three-part method to recognize capacitor bank switch events within a power…
Phasor Decomposition via Symmetrical Components in Three Phase Systems
Introduction When three phase systems are perfectly balanced sinusoidal waveforms, where the B and C phases are exact replicas of the A phase sine wave, but delayed by 120 and…
Record, Diagnose and Troubleshoot Oscillatory Transients
Oscillatory transients are caused by switching operations, nearby lightning strikes, or other impulsive noise exciting electrical resonances present on the network. The most common in the distribution system is defined…
Analyzing Portable Power Station Inverter Power Quality
An engineer at PMI purchased a portable power station and wanted to verify the quality of the inverter before attaching sensitive electronics. The steps used to quantify the output quality…
Interharmonic Analysis with Python
Traditional harmonic analysis in electrical systems has revolved around looking at the spectral content on, well, the magnitudes of harmonic frequency components. The IEEE 519 specification provides guidelines for measuring…
Advanced Waveform Analysis Using Python
PMI provides a suite of powerful power quality analysis software packages, from ProVision – the primary desktop offering – to Canvass and PQ Canvass, both web-based products, all well-suited for…
Tips on Transformer K-factor
Transformer loading is ultimately limited by internal heating caused by load current flow. Some heating is caused by resistive losses in the transformer winding. Another important heating source is eddy…
RMS Measurements and Harmonic Analysis
The RMS value is used to quantify the overall "size" of a waveform with a single number. By extension, harmonic amplitudes can be used to describe a complex waveform with…
Waveform Capture with Transient Capture Overlays
PMI Revolution recorders can record waveform captures and, with the transient capture option, high-speed microsecond-level transient captures. Transient captures have a much higher sampling rate than waveform captures but have…
Understanding Harmonic Power
Harmonic power is a complex and often misunderstood topic. This leads to misinterpretations, including using a harmonic power analysis when the measurements aren't physically meaningful. An overview of harmonic power…
Understanding Arc Fault Breakers
Arc Fault Breakers (or AFCI breakers) are sensitive breakers that augment traditional breakers' functionality by using logic and signal processing to determine whether or not an arcing condition is present.…
