Synchro-Waveforms: A New Era of Power Systems Monitoring and Situational Awareness

Synchro-Waveforms (also known as time-synchronized waveform measurements) are a powerful new technology for monitoring and situational awareness of power systems. Synchro-Waveforms are obtained from a new class of smart grid sensors called Waveform Measurement Units (WMUs). WMUs provide precise time-synchronized voltage waveform and current waveform measurements in time-domain. They show the wave-shape of the voltage and current at very high resolutions. WMUs operate at very high reporting rates, such as at 256 samples per cycle, i.e., 15,360 recordings per second. This is much higher than the sampling rate of practically every other smart grid sensor, such as phasor measurement units. At such a high reporting rate, a WMU reports 7,962,624,000 data points per day. This is an overwhelming amount of data that requires high-performance computing to analyze. Further, WMUs use a global positioning system (GPS) clock to precisely synchronize the sampling of waveforms across different WMUs, enabling precise time synchronization of the reported synchro-waveforms. The availability of synchro-waveform measurements can significantly enhance our understanding and awareness about the status of the power electric grid than traditional measurements. Therefore, synchro-waveforms introduce a new era of power systems monitoring and situational awareness. Synchro-waveforms offer groundbreaking applications in 1) event detection and classification, 2) event location identification, 3) topology identification, 4) network parameter estimation 5) asset monitoring, 6) incipient faults detection, and more importantly 7) wildfire monitoring.