LMFE: Learning-Based Multiscale Feature Engineering in Partial Discharge Detection

The partial discharge (PD) detection is of critical importance in the stability and continuity of power distribution operations. Although several feature engineering methods have been developed to refine and improve PD detection accuracy, they can be suboptimal due to several major issues: 1) failure in identifying fault-related pulses; 2) the lack of inner-phase temporal representation; and 3) multiscale feature integration. The aim of this article is to develop a learning-based multiscale feature engineering (LMFE) framework for PD detection of each signal in a three-phase power system, while addressing the above issues. The three-phase measurements are first preprocessed to identify the pulses together with the surrounded waveforms. Next, our feature engineering is conducted to extract the global-scale features, i.e., phase-level and measurement-level aggregations of the pulse-level information, and the local-scale features focusing on waveforms and their inner-phase temporal information. A recurrent neural network (RNN) model is trained, and intermediate features are extracted from this trained RNN model. Furthermore, these multiscale features are merged and fed into a classifier to distinguish the different patterns between faulty and nonfaulty signals. Finally, our LMFE is evaluated by analyzing the VSB ENET dataset, which shows that LMFE outperforms existing approaches and provides the state-of-the-art solution in PD detection.