UHF Partial Discharge Localization in Gas-Insulated Switchgears: Gradient Boosting Based Approach

In this paper, Finite Element (FE) solver of COMSOL Multiphysics is used to model Partial Discharge (PD) defects inside an L-structured Gas-Insulated Switchgear (GIS). The defects are modeled by short dipoles, which were randomly placed inside the GIS. Gaussian Pulses were used as inputs to the short dipoles. Consequently, Electromagnetic (EM) waves start propagating inside the GIS enclosure. Five Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) sensors were used to acquire the propagating waves. A large number of utilized sensors is attributed to the limited number of simulation scenarios that were used. The captured signals were fed into a Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM) algorithm to localize the defects inside the GIS. The dataset fed into the GBM algorithm were power, voltage and cumulative energy received by each sensor. The biggest challenge associated with applying the GBM algorithm is the limited amount of obtained data. This paper provides a method of modeling PD defects inside medium and high voltage devices which can then be used for PD localization. The obtained results showed high accuracy with RMSE values of 31.46mm, 71.85mm, and 58.13mm for the X, Y, and Z axes, respectively.