Neural networks and particle swarm for transformer oil diagnosis by dissolved gas analysis

Abstract The lifetime of power transformers is closely related to the insulating oil performance. This latter can degrade according to overheating, electric arcs, low or high energy discharges, etc. Such degradation can lead to transformer failures or breakdowns. Early detection of these problems is one of the most important steps to avoid such failures. More efficient diagnostic systems, such as artificial intelligence techniques, are recommended to overcome the limitations of the classical methods. This work deals with diagnosing the power transformer insulating oil by analysis of dissolved gases using new techniques. For this, we have proposed intelligent techniques based on Multilayer artificial neural networks (ANN). Thus, a multi-layer ANN-based model for fault detection is presented. To improve its classification rate, this one was optimized by a meta-heuristic technique as the particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique. Optimized ANNs have never been used in transformer insulating oil diagnostics so far. The robustness and effectiveness of the proposed model is demonstrated, and high accuracy is obtained.