Pattern recognition techniques and their applications for automatic classification of artificial partial discharge sources

Partial discharge (PD) source classification aims to identify the types of defects causing discharges in high voltage (HV) equipment. This paper presents a comprehensive study of applying pattern recognition techniques to automatic PD source classification. Three challenging issues are investigated in this paper. The first issue is the feature extraction for obtaining representative attributes from the original PD measurement data. Several approaches including stochastic neighbour embedding (SNE), principal component analysis (PCA), kernel principal component analysis (KPCA), discrete wavelet transform (DWT), and conventional statistic operators are adopted for feature extraction. The second issue is the pattern recognition algorithms for identifying various types of PD sources. A novel fuzzy support vector machine (FSVM) and a variety of artificial neural networks (ANNs) are applied in the paper. The third issue is the identification of multiple PD sources, which may occur in HV equipment simultaneously. Two approaches are proposed to address this issue. To evaluate the performance of various algorithms in this paper, extensive laboratory experiments on a number of artificial PD models are conducted. The classification results reveal that FSVM significantly outperforms a number of ANN algorithms. The practical PD sources classification for HV equipment is a considerable complicated problem. Therefore, this paper also discusses some issues of meaningful application of the above proposed pattern recognition techniques for practical PD sources classification of HV equipment.