Fault diagnosis of power equipment based on variational autoencoder and semi‐supervised learning

Summary The issue of fault diagnosis in power equipment is receiving increasing attention from scholars. Due to the important role played by bearings in power equipment, bearing faults have become the main factor causing the shutdown of wind turbines units. Therefore, this paper takes bearing equipment as an example for research. In order to solve the problem of insufficient and unbalanced fault sample data of wind turbines bearings, a fault diagnosis (FD) method based on variational autoencoder and semi‐supervised learning is proposed in this paper. Firstly, based on Label Propagation‐random forests (LP‐RFs) and a small number of labeled fault samples, a semi‐supervised learning algorithm is proposed to label the original data samples. Secondly, a small number of training samples are preprocessed by the variational autoencoder to reduce the imbalance of the fault samples. Then, the RFs‐based method is adopted to train the processed fault samples to obtain a mature FD classifier. Finally, the proposed method is applied to FD for bearings, and the results show that the proposed method can realize bearings fault diagnosis (BFD). And meanwhile, the proposed method can also be applied for fault diagnosis in power transmission and transformation systems.