The Performance of Electronic Current Transformer Fault Diagnosis Model: Using an Improved Whale Optimization Algorithm and RBF Neural Network

Abstract

With the widely application of electronic transformers in smart grids, transformer faults have become a pressing problem. However, reliable fault diagnosis of electronic current transformers (ECT) is still an open problem due to the complexity and diversity of fault types. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes an ECT fault diagnosis model based on radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) and optimizes the model parameters and the network size of RBFNN simultaneously via an improved whale optimization algorithm (WOA) to improve the classification accuracy and robustness of RBFNN. Since the classical WOA is easy to fall into a locally optimal performance, a hybrid multi-strategies WOA algorithm (CASAWOA) is proposed for further improvement in optimization performance. Firstly, we introduced the tent chaotic map strategy to improve the population diversity of WOA. Secondly, we introduced nonlinear convergence factor and adaptive inertia weight to enhance the exploitation ability of the WOA. Finally, on the premise of ensuring the convergence speed of the algorithm, we modified the simulated annealing mechanism in order to prevent premature convergence. The benchmark function tests show that the CASAWOA outperforms other state-of-the-art WOA algorithms in terms of convergence speed and exploration ability. Furthermore, to validate the performance of ECT fault diagnosis model based on CASAWOA-RBFNN, a comprehensive analysis of eight fault diagnosis methods is conducted based on the ECT fault samples collected from the detection circuit. The experimental results show that the CASAWOA-RBFNN achieves an accuracy of 97.77% in ECT fault diagnosis, which is 9.8% better than WOA-RBF and which shows promising engineering practicality.