The non-contact measurement of engine speed can be realized by analyzing engine vibration frequency. However, the vibration signal is distorted by harmonics and noise in the measurement. This paper presents a novel method for the measurement of engine rotation speed by using the cross-correlation of vibration and acoustic signals. This method can enhance the same frequency components in engine vibration and acoustic signal. After cross-correlation processing, the energy centrobaric correction method is applied to estimate the accurate frequency of the engine’s vibration. This method can be implemented with a low-cost embedded system estimating the cross-correlation. Test results showed that this method outperformed the traditional vibration-based measurement method.

One of the most challenging problems in the design of next-generation Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) is related to the need to minimize the impact of multiple harmonics and out-of-band interharmonics (OOBI) on the measurement of synchrophasors over short observation intervals. Most of the existing solutions aim at removing such narrowband disturbances before synchrophasor estimation. However, when data records are short, accurate OOBI filtering may be infeasible. The algorithm described in this paper tackles this problem through a prior estimation of the number and the frequency of the significant narrowband interferers emerging from the noise floor. This result is achieved using a non-parametric signal detector based on random matrix theory and hypothesis testing, followed by the application of the estimation of signal parameters via the rotational invariance technique (ESPRIT). Once the number and the frequency of the narrowband components are known, these parameters are used to augment the dimension of the frequency-domain linear system of equations employed by the Interpolated Dynamic Discrete Fourier Transform (IpD2FT) for synchrophasor estimation. The results of multiple simulations confirm not only that the proposed approach for narrowband components detection is robust and more accurate than other model-order estimation algorithms described in the scientific literature, but also that the synchrophasor estimation accuracy over two-cycle observation intervals is generally higher than using other for M Class PMUs algorithms when OOBIs or a mixture of OOBIs and harmonics are considered.

Frequency estimation plays a crucial role in monitoring and protecting smart grids. The excellence of DFT-based frequency estimators has been well-known due to their efficiency and robustness. However, multi-component interference has become one of the biggest challenges of DFT-based estimators. To this end, we propose a novel DFT-based method for estimating multi-frequency real-valued sinusoidal signals, which consist of P unknown components. The proposed method first constructs a nonlinear equation to describe the relationship between the parameters of all components and their frequency spectrum. The nonlinear equation is then transformed into a linear equation with 3 P unknowns for estimating the frequency. The proposed method takes the side-lobe interference and spectrum leakage of all components into consideration. As a result, the impacts of multi-component interference can be completely avoided. Experiments and simulations demonstrate that the proposed method not only meets the limitations of Standard IEC/IEEE 60255-118-1, but is also highly competitive with existing frequency estimators.

Accurate knowledge of oscillation parameters (i.e., frequency, amplitude, phase, and damping factor) is crucial for control strategies of power systems under power swing. This paper presents a method for the parameter estimation of power system oscillation signals under power swing based on Clarke–DFT. The proposed method provides accurate parameter estimation of damped sinusoidal signals for both balanced and unbalanced systems, which performs well even in the presence of harmonics. In the meantime, the negative frequency components in the spectra of the damped sinusoidal signals, which are caused by system imbalance, are calculated accurately using complex-valued interpolated DFT. To verify the performance of the proposed method, simulations are performed under balanced and unbalanced conditions. The results of the simulations confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method either in unbalanced or harmonic conditions.