Intelligent fault diagnosis of hydroelectric units based on radar maps and improved GoogleNet by depthwise separate convolution

Abstract Fault diagnosis plays an essential role in maintaining the safe and stable operation of hydroelectric units. In this paper, an intelligent fault diagnosis method based on radar maps and improved GoogleNet by depthwise separate convolution (DSC) is proposed to address the problems of low recognition accuracy and weak computing speed of fault diagnosis models in the field of hydroelectric unit fault diagnosis at present. Firstly, a one-dimensional signal sequence is obtained and denoised. Secondly, five time-domain features are extracted and radar maps are plotted. Then, an improved GoogleNet intelligent fault diagnosis model based on DSC (DSC-GoogleNet) is constructed for training and validation. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed model, two case studies are conducted using the simulated dataset of the rotor experimental bench and the actual measured dataset of a domestic hydroelectric power plant. The results demonstrate that the average recognition accuracy of the fault diagnosis method proposed in this paper is as high as 99.04% on the simulated dataset, and even though the recognition accuracy decreases on the actually measurement dataset, it still has a recognition rate of 98.79%. The fault diagnosis performance is better than the other types of comparison models. The results demonstrate that the proposed fault diagnosis method holds significant engineering applicability in the domain of safe operation of hydroelectric units. It effectively addresses the existing challenges in fault diagnosis within this field with accuracy, stability, and efficiency.