Partial discharge monitoring using deep neural networks with acoustic emission

The occurrence of partial discharge (PD) indicates failures in electrical equipment. Depending on the equipment and operating conditions, each type of PD has its own acoustic characteristics and a wide frequency spectrum. To detect PD, electrical equipment is often monitored using various sensors, such as microphones, ultrasonic, and transient-earth voltage, whose signals are then analyzed manually by experts using signal processing techniques. This process requires significant expertise and time, both of which are costly. Advancements in machine learning, aim to address this issue by automatically learning a representation of the signal, minimizing the need for expert analysis. To this end, we propose a deep learning-based solution for the automatic detection of PD using airborne sound emission in the audible to the ultrasonic range. As input to our proposed model, we evaluate common time-frequency representations of the acoustic signal, such as short-time Fourier, continuous wavelet transform and Mel spectrograms. The extracted spectrum from the PD signal pulses is used to train and evaluate the proposed deep neural network models for the detection of different types of PD. Compared to the manual process, the automatic solution is seen as beneficial for maintenance processes and measurement technology.