Pallav Kumar Bera

Pallav Kumar Bera

This dissertation highlights the growing interest in and adoption of machine learning (ML) approaches for fault detection in modern power grids. Once a fault has occurred, it must be identified quickly and preventative steps must be taken to remove or insulate it. As a result, detecting, locating, and classifying faults early and accurately can improve safety and dependability while reducing downtime and hardware damage. ML-based solutions and tools to carry out effective data processing and analysis to aid power system operations and decision-making are becoming preeminent with better system condition awareness and data availability. Power transformers, Phase Shift Transformers or Phase Angle Regulators, and transmission lines are critical components in power systems, and ensuring their safety is a primary issue. Differential relays are commonly employed to protect transformers, whereas distance relays are utilized to protect transmission lines. Magnetizing inrush, overexcitation, and current transformer saturation make transformer protection a challenge. Furthermore, non-standard phase shift, series core saturation, low turn-to-turn, and turn-to-ground fault currents are non-traditional problems associated with Phase Angle Regulators. Faults during symmetrical power swings and unstable power swings may cause mal-operation of distance relays and unintentional and uncontrolled islanding. The distance relays also mal-operate for transmission lines connected to type-3 wind farms. The conventional protection techniques would no longer be adequate to address the above challenges due to limitations in handling and analyzing massive amounts of data, limited generalizability, incapability to model non-linear systems, etc. These limitations of differential and distance protection methods bring forward the motivation of using ML in addressing various protection challenges.

Pallav Kumar Bera, Can Isik

This paper investigates the applicability of time and time-frequency features based classifiers to distinguish internal faults and other transients - magnetizing inrush, sympathetic inrush, external faults with current transformer saturation, and overexcitation - for Indirect Symmetrical Phase Angle Regulating Transformers (ISPAR). Then the faulty transformer unit (series/exciting) of the ISPAR is located, or else the transient disturbance is identified. An event detector detects variation in differential currents and registers one-cycle of 3-phase post transient samples which are used to extract the time and time-frequency features for training seven classifiers. Three different sets of features - wavelet coefficients, time-domain features, and combination of time and wavelet energy - obtained from exhaustive search using Decision Tree, random forest feature selection, and maximum Relevance Minimum Redundancy are used. The internal fault is detected with a balanced accuracy of 99.9%, the faulty unit is localized with balanced accuracy of 98.7% and the no-fault transients are classified with balanced accuracy of 99.5%. The results show potential for accurate internal fault detection and localization, and transient identification. The proposed scheme can supervise the operation of existing microprocessor-based differential relays resulting in higher stability and dependability. The ISPAR is modeled and the transients are simulated in PSCAD/EMTDC by varying several parameters.

Pallav Kumar Bera, Rajesh Kumar, Can Isik

This paper proposes methods to identify 40 different types of internal faults in an Indirect Symmetrical Phase Shift Transformer (ISPST). The ISPST was modeled using Power System Computer Aided Design (PSCAD)/ Electromagnetic Transients including DC (EMTDC). The internal faults were simulated by varying the transformer tapping, backward and forward phase shifts, loading, and percentage of winding faulted. Data for 960 cases of each type of fault was recorded. A series of features were extracted for a, b, and c phases from time, frequency, time-frequency, and information theory domains. The importance of the extracted features was evaluated through univariate tests which helped to reduce the number of features. The selected features were then used for training five state-of-the-art machine learning classifiers. Extremely Random Trees and Random Forest, the ensemble-based learners, achieved the accuracy of 98.76% and 97.54% respectively outperforming Multilayer Perceptron (96.13%), Logistic Regression (93.54%), and Support Vector Machines (92.60%)