Partial Discharge Signal Denoising for Gas-Insulated Switchgear Using Spearman Coefficient-Optimized VMD and Combined Filtering Algorithm

Partial discharge (PD) signals acquired from gas-insulated switchgear (GIS) are often severely contaminated by discrete-spectrum interference and periodic narrowband noise, which impairs the accuracy of subsequent fault diagnosis. This paper proposes a hybrid denoising method that integrates Spearman coefficient-optimized variational mode decomposition (S_VMD), spatially related recursive sample entropy (Sdr_SampEn) for intrinsic mode function (IMF) classification, an improved wavelet threshold function, and Savitzky–Golay (SG) filtering. First, the Spearman correlation coefficient between the original signal and the reconstructed signal is used to adaptively determine the optimal mode number K of VMD, avoiding the over- and under-decomposition problems of conventional VMD. Second, Sdr_SampEn, which characterizes signal irregularity along both the Chebyshev distance and spatial direction of a recurrence plot, is employed to classify the obtained IMFs into noise-dominant and PD-dominant components, with the discrimination threshold calibrated as p = 1.94 at 0 dB. Third, an improved wavelet threshold function—continuous at the threshold and asymptotically unbiased—is applied to the noise-dominant components, while SG filtering is applied to the PD-dominant components, after which the denoised signal is reconstructed. The results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively suppresses both white and narrowband noise while preserving the detailed morphology of PD pulses.