Classification of PD Faults Using Features Extraction and K-Means Clustering Techniques

Partial discharge (PD) diagnostic is a crucial tool for condition monitoring of power system equipment (e.g. switchgear, cable) in the medium voltage (MV) network, which is degraded by the gradual deterioration of insulation elements, ageing, and various operational and environmental stresses. In the MV network, different types of PD faults are generated from different sources and to know the impact of an individual PD fault on the health of MV equipment, classification plays an important role. This paper aims to provide suitable techniques for classifying PD faults. The data is collected from an experimental investigation of three different types of PD faults from MV switchgear and classified using features extraction, dimensionality reduction and clustering techniques. To identify the best classification technique, dimensionality reduction techniques (principal component analysis and t-distributed stochastic neighbour embedding) are used, and their results are compared using the confusion matrix after applying k-means clustering technique.