Automatic Power Quality Disturbance Diagnosis Based on Residual Denoising Convolutional Auto-Encoder

With the increasing integration of non-linear electronic loads, the diagnosis and classification of power quality are becoming crucial for power grid signal management. This paper presents a novel diagnosis strategy based on unsupervised learning, namely residual denoising convolutional auto-encoder (RDCA), which extracts features from the complex power quality disturbances (PQDs) automatically. Firstly, the time-frequency analysis is applied to isolate frequency domain information. Then, the RDCA with a weight residual structure is utilized to extract the useful features in the contaminated PQD data, where the performance is improved using the residual structure. A single-layer convolutional neural network (SCNN) with an added batch normalization layer is proposed to classify the features. Furthermore, combining with RDCA and SCNN, we further propose a classification framework to classify complex PQDs. To provide a reasonable interpretation of the RDCA, visual analysis is employed to gain insight into the model, leading to a better understanding of the features from different layers. The simulation and experimental tests are conducted to verify the practicability and robustness of the RDCA.