A Gas Production Classification Method for Cable Insulation Materials Based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a deep learning method to classify gas production in power cable insulation materials, improving fault detection accuracy.

Contribution

A novel deep convolutional neural network framework for multi-label classification of gas production in cable insulation materials.

Findings

The proposed DCNN model effectively identifies material-specific gas generation patterns.

The model accurately handles complex label co-occurrence scenarios in mixed-gas data.

The method outperforms traditional approaches in multi-fault pattern recognition.

Abstract

As a non-invasive diagnostic technique, evolved gas analysis (EGA) holds significant value in assessing the insulation conditions of critical equipment such as power cables. Current analytical methods face two major challenges: insulation materials may undergo multiple aging mechanisms simultaneously, leading to interfering characteristic gases; and traditional approaches lack the multi-label recognition capability to address concurrent fault patterns when processing mixed-gas data. These limitations hinder the accuracy and comprehensiveness of insulation condition assessment, underscoring the urgent need for intelligent analytical methods. This study proposes a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN)-based multi-label classification framework to accurately identify the gas generation characteristics of five typical power cable insulation materials—ethylene propylene diene monomer (EPDM), ethylene-vinyl acetate copolymer (EVA), silicone rubber (SR), polyamide (PA), and cross-linked polyethylene (XLPE)—under fault conditions. The method leverages concentration data of six characteristic gases (CO2, C2H4, C2H6, CH4, CO, and H2), integrating modern data analysis and deep learning techniques, including logarithmic transformation, Z-score normalization, multi-scale convolution, residual connections, channel attention mechanisms, and weighted binary cross-entropy loss functions, to enable simultaneous prediction of multiple degradation states or concurrent fault pattern combinations. By constructing a gas dataset covering diverse materials and operating conditions and conducting comparative experiments to validate the proposed DCNN model’s performance, the results demonstrate that the model can effectively learn material-specific gas generation patterns and accurately identify complex label co-occurrence scenarios. This approach provides technical support for improving the accuracy of insulation condition assessment in power cable equipment.

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