Abstract

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 triangle is a crucial part of understanding the power delivered from a source to a load. This construction has one major downside, that being it is only valid for sinusoidal signals. Often harmonics are present in the voltage or current waveform, which means that the results from the power triangle calculation are approximately correct but do not tell the full story. This paper describes a novel mathematical framework based on the work of Francisco Montoya, which naturally extends the ideas of the power triangle to domains of distorted waveforms.