Fault diagnosis of power transformers with membership degree

Abstract

Power transformers are important equipment for power systems, and a dissolved gas analysis (DGA) is widely used to detect incipient faults in oil-pregnant transformers. The conventional methods are prone to misinterpreting the gas data near the boundaries and the correct rate is low. Though a high correct rate is reported with intelligent methods as artificial neural network, support vector machine, and so on, these methods are usually too complicated to be implemented practically on a wide range. Based on clustering techniques, this paper proposes a new method for fault diagnosis of transformers with the DGA. A reference fault set is provided, and the fault diagnosis is implemented by calculating the membership of the DGA data to the reference fault set. Test with credible DGA dataset (201 field cases) shows that the correct rate of the new method is 89%, while the David triangle method is 79% and the IEC ratio method is 59%, which demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method to the conventional ones. The new method is simple and highly accurate, indicating a good application prospect in engineering practice.