Robust Estimation of Arrival Time of Complex Noisy Partial Discharge Pulse in Power Cables Based on Adaptive Variational Mode Decomposition

Periodic narrowband signals and white noise are the main interferences in online detection and localization of cable partial discharge (PD), however, existing research has always focused on the white noise suppression only, which is not in line with the actual scene. A novel de-noising method for effectively extracting random PD pulse from complex and strong interferences is proposed in this paper and applied to PD localization. Firstly, an improved adaptive variational mode decomposition (AVMD) is used to decompose periodic narrowband interference, white noise, and PD signal into different intrinsic mode. According to the characteristic that the power of intrinsic mode component of periodic narrowband interference in the discrete Fourier transformation (DFT) power spectrum is much larger than that of PD and white noise, the periodic narrowband is removed out. In order to effectively filter out white noise, a scale adaptive wavelet packet decomposition method based on correlation coefficient is proposed, which decomposes the signal into high, middle, and low-frequency components. The components with low frequency, small amplitude are removed out as the white noise interference according to the threshold method, and the residual is the de-noising PD signal. Experimental results show that the proposed method can robustly suppress the interference of periodic narrowband signal and white noise, and effectively preserve the essential characteristics of the real PD signal. In the multi-sensor travelling wave based localization system of cable PD source using time-varying kurtosis, accurate estimation of first arrival time of PD pulse can be achieved by the de-noising results.