This paper proposes a novel method for voltage transient detection and characterization using space phasor model (SPM) of the three phase-to-neutral voltages as basis. A Gaussian model based anomaly detection technique is used to extract transient samples as anomalous samples. The proposed method introduces and calculates a set of 'single-transient characteristics'(STC) for voltage transient events. This facilitates quantification of transients, leads to additional information about transient origin, and enables comparing different transients. The proposed method is not sensitive to shallow harmonic distortion particularly in deal with oscillating transients.

A number of transients measured at distribution or transmission level have been applied to the proposed method. The simulation results support the effectiveness of the SPM for voltage transient analytics.