It is known that flickers and interharmonics have an inherent relationship, and the magnitude of a voltage can fluctuate as the signal contains interharmonics. In particular, flicker or modulation will occur when the interharmonic is close to a harmonic (or fundamental) frequency. Current spectrum separation approaches can detect harmonics and main interharmonics effectively, but they may not be applicable for the situation of adjacent interharmonics from either divergence effect, sensitive spectral leakage or other drawbacks. For this reason, this study develops a strategy of maximum energy retrieving (MER) method to distinguish and identify those interharmonics which are adjacent to fundamental or harmonics in power systems. Based on the appropriate selection of sampling window length using discrete Fourier transform (DFT), neighbouring dispersed energy can be collected to retrieve its original amplitude value. The frequency component can be thus determined simultaneously when the total collected energy reaches the maximum. The MER implementation can be converged within only several iteration loops where parallel DFT computation is required before the convergent process. The numerical example is used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach in term of reliability and accuracy.
