Thermal Fault Diagnosis of Electrical Equipment in Substations Using Lightweight Convolutional Neural Network

Real-time equipment condition monitoring is crucial to ensure the regular operation of the electric system. However, the deployed heavy convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are defective for edge computation and offline diagnosis. The purpose of this article is to present a system for detecting overheating faults of substation equipment using infrared photos and U-Net deep learning techniques. First, a stepwise encoder employs a lightweight CNN (LCNN) based on inverted residuals with depthwise separable convolution. The fault location is then decoded in the decoder using stepwise upsampling and nearest-neighbor interpolation. We additionally incorporate low-level detail feature information from the encoder to include additional fault data. Finally, testing findings on our dataset demonstrated the proposed method’s superior reliability and efficiency under a variety of evaluation metrics. Ultimately, we reached a lighter structure and leading estimation with a small training dataset, so our method is well-suited for deployment on mobile devices.