A Comparative Study Between Prony and Eigensystem Realization Algorithm for Identification of Electromechanical Modes

Two measurement-based ring-down electromechanical mode identification algorithms, namely Prony and Eigensystem Realization Algorithm (ERA) are taken up for a comparative study. Since the number of excited modes might vary in a practical power system, it is not easy to determine the model order. This requires an iterative procedure in case of Prony whereas a Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)-based technique achieves this directly in case of ERA as demonstrated through two case studies. It is further shown that ERA estimates the signal better and generates less number of trivial modes as compared to Prony.