Quality of energy produced in renewable energy systems has to be at the high level specified by respective standards and directives. One of the most important factors affecting quality is the estimation accuracy of grid signal parameters. This paper presents a method of a very fast and accurate amplitude and phase grid signal estimation using the Fast Fourier Transform procedure and maximum decay side-lobes windows. The most important features of the method are elimination of the impact associated with the conjugate’s component on the results and its straightforward implementation. Moreover, the measurement time is very short ‒ even far less than one period of the grid signal. The influence of harmonics on the results is reduced by using a bandpass pre-filter. Even using a 40 dB FIR pre-filter for the grid signal with THD ≈ 38%, SNR ≈ 53 dB and a 20‒30% slow decay exponential drift the maximum estimation errors in a real-time DSP system for 512 samples are approximately 1% for the amplitude and approximately 8.5・10‒2 rad for the phase, respectively. The errors are smaller by several orders of magnitude with using more accurate pre-filters.

The paper deals with frequency estimation methods of sine-wave signals for a few signal cycles and consists of two parts. The first part contains a short overview where analytical error formulae for a signal distorted by noise and harmonics are presented. These formulae are compared with other accurate equations presented previously by the authors which are even more accurate below one cycle in the measurement window. The second part contains a comparison of eight estimation methods (ESPRIT, TLS, Prony LS, a newly developed IpDFT method and four other 3-point IpDFT methods) in respect of calculation time and accuracy for an ideal sine-wave signal, signal distorted by AWGN noise and a signal distorted by harmonics. The number of signal cycles is limited from 0.1 to 3 or 5. The results enable to select the most accurate/ fastest estimation method in various measurement conditions. Parametric methods are more accurate but also much slower than IpDFT methods (up to 3000 times for the number of samples equal to 5000). The presented method is more accurate than other IpDFT methods and much faster than parametric methods, which makes it possible to use it as an alternative, especially in real-time applications.

Fast and accurate grid signal frequency estimation is a very important issue in the control of renewable energy systems. Important factors that influence the estimation accuracy include the A/D converter parameters in the inverter control system. This paper presents the influence of the number of A/D converter bits b, the phase shift of the grid signal relative to the time window, the width of the time window relative to the grid signal period (expressed as a cycle in range (CiR) parameter) and the number of N samples obtained in this window with the A/D converter on the developed estimation method results. An increase in the number b by 8 decreases the estimation error by approximately 256 times. The largest estimation error occurs when the signal module maximum is in the time window center (for small values of CiR) or when the signal value is zero in the time window center (for large values of CiR). In practical applications, the dominant component of the frequency estimation error is the error caused by the quantization noise, and its range is from approximately 8×10-10 to 6×10-4.

The paper presents the key-finding algorithm based on the music signature concept. The proposed music signature is a set of 2-D vectors which can be treated as a compressed form of representation of a musical content in the 2-D space. Each vector represents different pitch class. Its direction is determined by the position of the corresponding major key in the circle of fifths. The length of each vector reflects the multiplicity (i.e. number of occurrences) of the pitch class in a musical piece or its fragment. The paper presents the theoretical background, examples explaining the essence of the idea and the results of the conducted tests which confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm for finding the key based on the analysis of the music signature. The developed method was compared with the key-finding algorithms using Krumhansl-Kessler, Temperley and Albrecht-Shanahan profiles. The experiments were performed on the set of Bach preludes, Bach fugues and Chopin preludes.