Arc faults can produce very high temperatures and can easily ignite combustible materials; thus, they represent one of the most important causes of electrical fires. The application of arc fault detection, as an emerging early fire detection technology, is required by the National Electrical Code to reduce the occurrence of electrical fires. However, the concealment, randomness and diversity of arc faults make them difficult to detect. To improve the accuracy of arc fault detection, a novel arc fault detector (AFD) is developed in this study. First, an experimental arc fault platform is built to study electrical fires. A high-frequency transducer and a current transducer are used to measure typical load signals of arc faults and normal states. After the common features of these signals are studied, high-frequency energy and current variations are extracted as an input eigenvector for use by an arc fault detection algorithm. Then, the detection algorithm based on a weighted least squares support vector machine is designed and successfully applied in a microprocessor. Finally, an AFD is developed. The test results show that the AFD can detect arc faults in a timely manner and interrupt the circuit power supply before electrical fires can occur. The AFD is not influenced by cross talk or transient processes, and the detection accuracy is very high. Hence, the AFD can be installed in low-voltage circuits to monitor circuit states in real-time to facilitate the early detection of electrical fires.

Arc fault is one of the most critical reasons for electrical fires. Due to the diversity, randomness and concealment of arc faults in low-voltage circuits, it is difficult for general methods to protect all loads from series arc faults. From the analysis of many series arc faults, a large number of high frequency signals generated in circuits are found. These signals are easily affected by Gaussian noise which is difficult to be eliminated as a result of frequency aliasing. Thus, a novel detection algorithm is developed to accurately detect series arc faults in this paper. Initially, an autoregressive model of the mixed high frequency signals is modelled. Then, autoregressive bispectrum analysis is introduced to analyze common series arc fault features. The phase information of arc fault signal is preserved using this method. The influence of Gaussian noise is restrained effectively. Afterwards, several features including characteristic frequency, fluctuation of phase angles, diffused distribution and incremental numbers of bispectrum peaks are extracted for recognizing arc faults. Finally, least squares support vector machine is used to accurately identify series arc faults from the load states based on these frequency features of bispectrum. The validity of the algorithm is experimentally verified obtaining arc fault detection rate above 97%. OPEN ACCESSAlgorithms 2015, 8 930

AC arc faults are one of the most important causes of residential electrical wiring fires, which may produce extremely high temperatures and easily ignite surrounding combustible materials. The global interest in machine learning-based methods for arc fault diagnosis applications is increasing due to continuous challenges in efficiency and accuracy. In this paper, a temporal domain visualization convolutional neural network (TDV-CNN) methodology is proposed. The current transformer and high-speed data acquisition system are used to collect the current of a series of arc faults, then the signal is filtered by a digital filter and converted into a gray image in time sequence before being fed into TDV-CNN. Five different electric loads were selected for experimental validation with various signal characteristics, including vacuum cleaner, fluorescent lamp, dimmer, heater, and desktop computer. The experimental results confirm that the classification accuracy of the five loads’ work states in the ten categories could reach 98.7% or even higher by adjusting parameters perfectly. The methodology is believed to be reliable for series arc detection with relatively high accuracy and also has important potential applications in other fault diagnosis fields.

Form error evaluation of geometrical products is a nonlinear optimization problem, for which a solution has been attempted by different methods with some complexity. A genetic algorithm (GA) was developed to deal with the problem, which was proved simple to understand and realize, and its key techniques have been investigated in detail. Firstly, the fitness function of GA was discussed emphatically as a bridge between GA and the concrete problems to be solved. Secondly, the real numbers-based representation of the desired solutions in the continual space optimization problem was discussed. Thirdly, many improved evolutionary strategies of GA were described on emphasis. These evolutionary strategies were the selection operation of ‘odd number selection plus roulette wheel selection’, the crossover operation of ‘arithmetic crossover between near relatives and far relatives’ and the mutation operation of ‘adaptive Gaussian’ mutation. After evolutions from generation to generation with the evolutionary strategies, the initial population produced stochastically around the least-squared solutions of the problem would be updated and improved iteratively till the best chromosome or individual of GA appeared. Finally, some examples were given to verify the evolutionary method. Experimental results show that the GA-based method can find desired solutions that are superior to the least-squared solutions except for a few examples in which the GA-based method can obtain similar results to those by the least-squared method. Compared with other optimization techniques, the GA-based method can obtain almost equal results but with less complicated models and computation time.

Arc faults induced by residential low-voltage distribution network lines are still one of the main causes of residential fires. When a series arc fault occurs on the line, the value of the fault current in the circuit is limited by the load. Traditional circuit protection devices cannot detect series arcs and generate a trip signal to implement protection. This paper proposes a novel high-frequency coupling sensor for extracting the features of low-voltage series arc faults. This sensor is used to collect the high-frequency feature signals of various loads in series arc state and normal working state. The signal will be transformed into two-dimensional feature gray images according to the temporal-domain sequence. A neural network with a three-layer structure based on convolution neural network is designed, trained and tested using the various typical loads’ arc states and normal states data sets composed of these images. This detection method can simultaneously accurately identify series arc, as well as the load type. Seven different domestic appliances were selected for experimental verification, including a desktop computer, vacuum cleaner, induction cooker, fluorescent lamp, dimmer, heater and electric drill. Then, the stability and universality of the detection algorithm is also verified by using electronic load with adjustable power factor and peak factor. The experimental results show that the designed sensor has the advantages of simple structure and wide frequency response range. The detection algorithm comparison confirms that the classification accuracy of the seven domestic appliances’ work states in the fourteen categories could reach 98.36%. The adjustable load in the two categories could reach above 99%. The feasibility of hardware implementation based on FPGA of this method is also evaluated.