Interpretable Fault Diagnosis for Overhead Lines with Covered Conductors: A Physics-Informed Deep Learning Approach

Partial discharge (PD) activity is an indicator of insulation deterioration and by extension, the reliability of power lines. Existing data-driven methods, while helpful, treat PD detection as a binary classification problem, thereby failing to provide physical information (e.g., filter PD pulse), and often provide results that contradict physical knowledge. To tackle this challenge, this paper develops a physics-informed temporal convolutional network (PITCN) for PD diagnosis (i.e., PD detection and PD pulse filtering). During training, physical knowledge of the background noise and PD pulse identification is integrated into a learning model. Once the model is trained, the PITCN can automatically detect PD activity from time-series voltage signals with different background noises and filter PD pulses. Experimental results demonstrate that the developed PITCN outper-forms the rest of the data-driven methods implemented, and in particular, the Matthews correlation coefficient of PITCN surpasses the conventional temporal convolutional network by 0.21.