A Novel Method for Detection and Location of Series Arc Fault for Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring

Series arc faults cause the majority of household fires involving electrical failures or malfunctions. Low-fault current amplitude is the reason for the difficulties faced in implementing effective arc detection systems. The paper presents a novel arc detection and faulty line identification method. It can be easily used in the low-voltage Alternate Current (AC) household network for arc detection in the Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM). Unlike existing methods, the proposed approach exploits both current and voltage signal time domain analysis. Experiments have been conducted with up to six devices operating simultaneously in the same circuit with an arc fault generator based on the IEC 62606:2013 standard. Sixteen time-domain features were used to maximize the arc-fault detection accuracy for particular appliances. Performance of the random forest classifier for arc fault detection was evaluated for 28 sets of features with five different sampling rates. For the single period analysis arc, detection accuracy was 98.38%, with F-score of 0.9870, while in terms of the IEC 62606:2013 standard, it was 99.07%, with F-score of 0.9925. Location of a series arc fault (line selection) was realized by identifying devices powered by the faulty line. The line selection was based on the Mean Values of Changes feature vector (MVC50), calculated for absolute values of differences between adjacent current signal periods during the arc fault. The fault location accuracy was 93.20% for all cases and 98.20% for cases where the arc fault affected a single device.