Classification of partial discharge EMI conditions using permutation entropy-based features

In this paper we investigate the application of feature extraction and machine learning techniques to fault identification in power systems. Specifically we implement the novel application of Permutation Entropy-based measures known as Weighted Permutation and Dispersion Entropy to field Electro-Magnetic Interference (EMI) signals for classification of discharge sources, also called conditions, such as partial discharge, arcing and corona which arise from various assets of different power sites. This work introduces two main contributions: the application of entropy measures in condition monitoring and the classification of real field EMI captured signals. The two simple and low dimension features are fed to a Multi-Class Support Vector Machine for the classification of different discharge sources contained in the EMI signals. Classification was performed to distinguish between the conditions observed within each site and between all sites. Results demonstrate that the proposed approach separated and identified the discharge sources successfully.