Fast algorithm for contactless partial discharge detection on remote gateway device

Abstract

Detection of the high impedance fault caused by vegetation is one of the biggest challenges brought by the usage of covered conductors in medium voltage overhead power lines. One of the accompanying events of long-term contact of vegetation with the XLPE insulation is partial discharge which damages the insulation. Current systems for the detection of partial discharge have two major problems: the price and difficult installation. In this paper, an approach for the detection of the partial discharge from the data collected by the antenna is described. This approach is focused on the small computational demand and low false positive rate. Thanks to the small computational requirements, it can be run on the remote gateway devices which are collecting the data from the antenna. It is composed of four steps: outlier detection, outlier clustering, feature extraction, and classification. It is shown that this approach greatly improves the detection rate and lowers false positives compared to the previous algorithm used for partial discharge detection based on the data from an antenna, making it fit to use in the production environment.