Discussion of the application of IEEE Std 1459–2010 to power electronics

The IEEE Std 1459–2010 describes standard definitions for the measurement of electric power quantities under sinusoidal, nonsinusoidal, balanced, or unbalanced conditions. In this paper, the nonactive power definitions of Std 1459 are used to calculate the power stored or transferred by each circuit element of a conventional boost converter. It has been found that the nonsinusoidal definitions of this standard do not accurately measure power when the voltage signal is nonsinusoidal and the current signal is a dc, or when the current signal is nonsinusoidal and the voltage signal is a dc. A constant signal multiplied with a nonsinusoidal signal result in a zero nonactive power. Any nonactive power component that depends on the fundamental or harmonic term of a dc signal will yield a zero result, and therefore resulting in a zero nonactive power. A zero nonactive power is inaccurate for a converter with storage elements. This is because there must be a power exchange between storage elements for power conversion to occur. This power exchange can clearly be observed in time domain analysis. A modification of nonactive power definition from IEEE Std 1459–2010 is proposed. The modification allows the dc signal to be multiplied with the fundamental or harmonic terms of a nonsinusoidal signal. The modification is only applicable to power electronics and allows the accurate measure of the intrinsic nonactive power of a converter which is exchanged by the storage elements. The proposed modification yields a nonzero nonactive power which has been validated with the conservation of energy principle for a dc-dc converter processing 100 % of its input power.