Separating Multi-Source Partial Discharge Signals Using Linear Prediction Analysis and Isolation Forest Algorithm

Partial discharge (PD) detection is an effective way to find defects and diagnose the insulation condition of power equipment. During manufacturing and operating, there may exist multi-source PD signals in the equipment, which could seriously affect the accuracy of subsequent defect analyses. In this paper, a universal separation methodology using linear prediction analysis (LPA) and the isolation forest algorithm (IFA) is introduced. By approximating the present waveform point by a linear combination of several points in the past, a 12-D linear prediction cepstrum coefficient (LPCC) feature space can be established which can accurately characterize PD waveforms. In this paper, we applied principal component analysis (PCA) to reduce the feature space to 2-D space. The IFA was adopted to separate multi-source PD signals which quantified the degree of clustering and added one more parameter based on the original features. Thus, the proposed method can separate multiple PD sources effectively even if the difference in the features of different types of PDs is small. In addition, the proposed algorithm easily removed the noise points during the separation process. The algorithm was applied to different types of PD signals on 35-kV transformers and a three-source PD data set on a 252-kV gas-insulated switchgear (GIS) platform. The separation results confirm that the proposed algorithm can effectively separate and distinguish various PD signals.