Partial Discharge Pattern Recognition of Gas-Insulated Switchgear via a Light-Scale Convolutional Neural Network

Partial discharge (PD) is one of the major form expressions of gas-insulated switchgear (GIS) insulation defects. Because PD will accelerate equipment aging, online monitoring and fault diagnosis plays a significant role in ensuring safe and reliable operation of the power system. Owing to feature engineering or vanishing gradients, however, existing pattern recognition methods for GIS PD are complex and inefficient. To improve recognition accuracy, a novel GIS PD pattern recognition method based on a light-scale convolutional neural network (LCNN) without artificial feature engineering is proposed. Firstly, GIS PD data are obtained through experiments and finite-difference time-domain simulations. Secondly, data enhancement is reinforced by a conditional variation auto-encoder. Thirdly, the LCNN structure is applied for GIS PD pattern recognition while the deconvolution neural network is used for model visualization. The recognition accuracy of the LCNN was 98.13%. Compared with traditional machine learning and other deep convolutional neural networks, the proposed method can effectively improve recognition accuracy and shorten calculation time, thus making it much more suitable for the ubiquitous-power Internet of Things and big data.