A Novel Impedance Estimation Method for Determining Voltage Unbalance Contributions Based on an Optimization Algorithm

The problem of “unbalance responsibility-sharing” is a matter of great concern for utility and consumer entities due to the increase in voltage unbalances, especially in electrical distribution systems. This issue arises from the need to determine the individual contributions of the utility and the consumer to the total unbalance at the point of common coupling between the entities. In the literature, the Superposition Method stands out as an effective approach to solving this problem. However, this procedure requires utility and consumer negative-sequence impedances, which are difficult to obtain in real-life scenarios. There is a variety of impedance estimation methods to overcome this issue, with emphasis on non-invasive methods. According to the literature, some of these procedures have practical and accuracy limitations. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel non-invasive impedance estimation method, termed the Correlation Minimization Method (CMM), which is based, essentially, on an optimization algorithm. In addition, computational simulations and field tests were carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed method in comparison with existing approaches. The results show that the proposed method performed satisfactorily, even in the most adverse situations.