Particle identification in terms of acoustic partial discharge measurements in transformer oils

Acoustic measurements of partial discharge (PD) are employed to classify particles in transformer mineral oil according to material and size. Wavelet multi-resolution analysis data of the acoustic signals together with higher order statistics of the particle intercollision times and magnitudes comprise the input features to a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. The training and validation measurement data, which are contaminated by time varying noise, are first filtered using wavelet decomposition. Results indicate that the SVM algorithm with the selected features provides a remarkably high success rate when classifying particles by size and material type. A potentially significant conclusion is that acoustic measurements alone are by themselves effective in classifying discharged particles in terms of the foregoing selected features. The proposed algorithm can be employed to enhance quality control procedures based on acoustic measurements of partial discharge.