Remote Condition Monitoring of HVDC Cable Insulation Using Deep Learning-Aided Space Charge Classification

The homo-charges accumulated inside the polymeric insulation of high voltage dc (HVdc) cables increase the electrical field beyond the uniform value, whereas the hetero-charges reduce it. Such uneven electrical field distribution is detrimental to HVdc cables’ longevity and thus, needs to be identified accurately. To this end, this article proposes a deep learning (DL) framework for the automated detection of space charges in HVdc cable insulation. The space charges inside the cross-linked polyethylene (XLPE) insulation samples were measured under varying electric fields (10–50 kV/mm) as well as at different temperatures (30 °C–70 °C) conditions. The obtained space charge profiles corresponding to no charge, hetero-charge, and homo-charge categories were fed to two benchmark convolutional neural network (CNN) models, i.e., AlexNet and VGGNet16, for automated feature extraction and classification purpose. The convolutional blocks of the two CNN models were sequentially fine-tuned using transfer learning (TL) to observe the variation in classification accuracies. The proposed approach delivers appreciably high classification accuracies irrespective of varying electric field and temperature conditions with reduced computational time toward distinguishing different categories of space charge accumulations compared to other CNN models. Hence, it can be potentially used for real-time HVdc insulation diagnostic purposes.