A Random Forest Model Based Pollution Severity Classification Scheme of High Voltage Transmission Line Insulators

Tower insulators in electric power transmission network play a crucial role in preserving the reliability of the system. Electrical utilities frequently face the problem of flashover of insulators due to pollution deposition on their surface. Several research works based on leakage current (LC) measurement has been already carried out in developing diagnostic techniques for these insulators. Since the LC signal is highly intermittent in nature, estimation of pollution severity based on LC signal measurement over a short period of time will not produce accurate results. Reports on the measurement and analysis of LC signals over a long period of time is scanty. This paper attempts to use Random Forest (RF) classifier, which produces accurate results on large data bases, to analyze the pollution severity of high voltage tower insulators. Leakage current characteristics over a long period of time were measured in the laboratory on porcelain insulator. Pollution experiments were conducted at 11 kV AC voltage. Time domain analysis and wavelet transform technique were used to extract both basic features and histogram features of the LC signal. RF model was trained and tested with a variety of LC signals measured over a lengthy period of time and it is noticed that the proposed RF model based pollution severity classifier is efficient and will be helpful to electrical utilities for real time implementation.