Mode-meter for distributed computing of Inter-area Oscillations in the Power Grid

Power grid stability needs to be monitored real time for the system to run predictably. Modes are frequency components in the power system due to generator inertia, transmission line impedance, governor and excitation control, etc. A mode-meter takes in synchrophasor data as an input and autonomously provide mode and damping estimates about inter-area oscillations present in the power grid. Mode and damping estimates are indicators of small signal stability of the power grid which can be used to do predictive maintenance or provide historical data if some major event such as cascading power failure were to happen. This capstone project focuses on packaging a classroom object using an ultra-low cost CPU to calculate mode estimates in near real-time. For this purpose, Modified Yule-Walker method is applied to a sliding window of 20 minutes of data where mode estimates are calculated for every 10 seconds.