Search

Power quality disturbance (PQD) monitoring has become an important issue due to the growing number of disturbing loads connected to the power line and to the susceptibility of certain loads to their presence. In any real power system, there are multiple sources of several disturbances which can have different magnitudes and appear at different times. In order to avoid equipment damage and estimate the damage severity, they have to be detected, classified, and quantified. In this work, a smart sensor for detection, classification, and quantification of PQD is proposed. First, the Hilbert transform (HT) is used as detection technique; then, the classification of the envelope of a PQD obtained through HT is carried out by a feed forward neural network (FFNN). Finally, the root mean square voltage (Vrms), peak voltage (Vpeak), crest factor (CF), and total harmonic distortion (THD) indices calculated through HT and Parseval's theorem as well as an instantaneous exponential time constant quantify the PQD according to the disturbance presented. The aforementioned methodology is processed online using digital hardware signal processing based on field programmable gate array (FPGA). Besides, the proposed smart sensor performance is validated and tested through synthetic signals and under real operating conditions, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most critical devices in an electrical system is the transformer. It is continuously under different electrical and mechanical stresses that can produce failures in its components and other electrical network devices. The short-circuited turns (SCTs) are a common winding failure. This type of fault has been widely studied in literature employing the vibration signals produced in the transformer. Although promising results have been obtained, it is not a trivial task if different severity levels and a common high-level noise are considered. This paper presents a methodology based on statistical time features (STFs) and support vector machines (SVM) to diagnose a transformer under several SCTs conditions. As STFs, 19 indicators from the transformer vibration signals are computed; then, the most discriminant features are selected using the Fisher score analysis, and the linear discriminant analysis is used for dimension reduction. Finally, a support vector machine classifier is employed to carry out the diagnosis in an automatic way. Once the methodology has been developed, it is implemented on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to provide a system-on-a-chip solution. A modified transformer capable of emulating different SCTs severities is employed to validate and test the methodology and its FPGA implementation. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposal for diagnosing the transformer condition as an accuracy of 96.82% is obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic and personal consequences that a car accident generates for society have been increasing in recent years. One of the causes that can generate a car accident is the stress level the driver has; consequently, the detection of stress events is a highly desirable task. In this article, the efficacy that statistical time features (STFs), such as root mean square, mean, variance, and standard deviation, among others, can reach in detecting stress events using electromyographical signals in drivers is investigated, since they can measure subtle changes that a signal can have. The obtained results show that the variance and standard deviation coupled with a support vector machine classifier with a cubic kernel are effective for detecting stress events where an AUC of 0.97 is reached. In this sense, since SVM has different kernels that can be trained, they are used to find out which one has the best efficacy using the STFs as feature inputs and a training strategy; thus, information about model explain ability can be determined. The explainability of the machine learning algorithm allows generating a deeper comprehension about the model efficacy and what model should be selected depending on the features used to its development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although induction motors (IMs) are robust and reliable electrical machines, they can suffer different faults due to usual operating conditions such as abrupt changes in the mechanical load, voltage, and current power quality problems, as well as due to extended operating conditions. In the literature, different faults have been investigated; however, the broken rotor bar has become one of the most studied faults since the IM can operate with apparent normality but the consequences can be catastrophic if the fault is not detected in low-severity stages. In this work, a methodology based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for automatic detection of broken rotor bars by considering different severity levels is proposed. To exploit the capabilities of CNNs to carry out automatic image classification, the short-time Fourier transform-based time–frequency plane and the motor current signature analysis (MCSA) approach for current signals in the transient state are first used. In the experimentation, four IM conditions were considered: half-broken rotor bar, one broken rotor bar, two broken rotor bars, and a healthy rotor. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposal, achieving 100% of accuracy in the diagnosis task for all the study cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heart diseases are among the most common death causes in the population. Particularly, sudden cardiac death (SCD) is the cause of 10% of the deaths around the world. For this reason, it is necessary to develop new methodologies that can predict this event in the earliest possible stage. This work presents a novel methodology to predict when a person can develop an SCD episode before it occurs. It is based on the adroit combination of the empirical mode decomposition, nonlinear measurements, such as the Higuchi fractal and permutation entropy, and a neural network. The obtained results show that the proposed methodology is capable of detecting an SCD episode 25 min before it appears with a 94% accuracy. The main benefits of the proposal are: (1) an improved detection time of 25% compared with previously published works, (2) moderate computational complexity since only two features are used, and (3) it uses the raw ECG without any preprocessing stage, unlike recent previous works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]