A new approach for measurement and prediction of voltage flicker magnitude and frequency

This paper introduces a new technique based on the simulated annealing (SA) optimization algorithm to measure the voltage flicker magnitude and frequency. Moreover, the power system voltage magnitude, frequency and phase angle is estimated by the proposed technique. The problem is a highly nonlinear optimization problem in continuous variables. An efficient SA algorithm with an adaptive cooling schedule and a new method for variable discretization are implemented. The new algorithm minimizes the sum of the absolute value of the error in the estimated voltage signal, and does need any approximation in modeling the voltage signal, such as using Taylor's series expansion. Effects of sampling frequency as well as number of samples are discussed.