A novel time-domain linear ringdown method based on vector fitting for estimating electromechanical modes

Abstract This paper proposes a novel method, called Ringdown Time-Domain Vector Fitting (RTD-VF), for estimating electromechanical modes in interconnected power systems. Such a method authentically extends, to the context of ringdown analysis, the well known Time-Domain Vector Fitting (TD-VF) method, which has already been successfully applied within other power systems areas. The proposed method is based on a state-space discretization framework which enables ringdown events to be effectively estimated when described as artificial unit impulse responses. Moreover, RTD-VF completely avoids the necessity to perform discrete Fourier transforms (DFTs) of ringdown data sequences. Three case studies are used to validate the proposed method. One of the examples considers a synthetic test signal, whereas the other two case studies consider actual ringdown data sets extracted from the North American Eastern Interconnection (NAEI) system and from the Brazilian Interconnected Power (BIP) system.