Partial Discharge Recognition with a Multi-Resolution Convolutional Neural Network

Partial discharge (PD) is not only an important symptom for monitoring the imperfections in the insulation system of a gas-insulated switchgear (GIS), but also the factor that accelerates the degradation. At present, monitoring ultra-high-frequency (UHF) signals induced by PDs is regarded as one of the most effective approaches for assessing the insulation severity and classifying the PDs. Therefore, in this paper, a deep learning-based PD classification algorithm is proposed and realized with a multi-column convolutional neural network (CNN) that incorporates UHF spectra of multiple resolutions. First, three subnetworks, as characterized by their specified designed temporal filters, frequency filters, and texture filters, are organized and then intergraded by a fully-connected neural network. Then, a long short-term memory (LSTM) network is utilized for fusing the embedded multi-sensor information. Furthermore, to alleviate the risk of overfitting, a transfer learning approach inspired by manifold learning is also present for model training. To demonstrate, 13 modes of defects considering both the defect types and their relative positions were well designed for a simulated GIS tank. A detailed analysis of the performance reveals the clear superiority of the proposed method, compared to18 typical baselines. Several advanced visualization techniques are also implemented to explore the possible qualitative interpretations of the learned features. Finally, a unified framework based on matrix projection is discussed to provide a possible explanation for the effectiveness of the architecture.