The surface contamination of electrical insulators can increase the electrical conductivity of these components, which may lead to faults in the electrical power system. During inspections, ultrasound equipment is employed to detect defective insulators or those that may cause failures within a certain period. Assuming that the signal collected by the ultrasound device can be processed and used for both the detection of defective insulators and prediction of failures, this study starts by presenting an experimental procedure considering a contaminated insulator removed from the distribution line for data acquisition. Based on the obtained data set, an offline time series forecasting approach with an Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) was conducted. To improve the time series forecasting performance and to reduce the noise, Wavelet Packets Transform (WPT) was associated to the ANFIS model. Once the ANFIS model associated with WPT has distinct parameters to be adjusted, a complete evaluation concerning different model configurations was conducted. In this case, three inference system structures were evaluated: grid partition, fuzzy c-means clustering, and subtractive clustering. A performance analysis focusing on computational effort and the coefficient of determination provided additional parameter configurations for the model. Taking into account both parametrical and statistical analysis, the Wavelet Neuro-Fuzzy System with fuzzy c-means showed that it is possible to achieve impressive accuracy, even when compared to classical approaches, in the prediction of electrical insulators conditions.
Contamination in insulators results in an increase in surface conductivity. With higher surface conductivity, insulators are more vulnerable to discharges that can damage them, thus reducing the reliability of the electrical system. One of the indications that the insulator is losing its insulating properties is its increase in leakage current. By varying the leakage current over time, it is possible to determine whether the insulator will develop an irreversible failure. In this way, by predicting the increase in leakage current, it is possible to carry out maintenance to avoid system failures. For forecasting time series, there are many models that have been studied and the definition of which model is suitable for evaluation depends on the characteristics of the data associated with the analysis. Thus, this work aims to identify the most suitable model to predict the increase in leakage current in relation to the time the insulator is outdoors, exposed to environmental variations using the same database to compare the methods. In this paper, the models based on linear regression, support vector regression (SVR), multilayer Perceptron (MLP), deep neural network (DNN), and recurrent neural network (RNN) will be analyzed comparatively. The best accuracy results for prediction were found using the RNN models, resulting in an accuracy of up to 97.25%.
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