Fault Diagnosis of Transformer Based on Cluster Analysis

ZHAO Feng
Jiyuan Power Supply Company of Henan Electric Power Company

Jiyuan, China

Abstract—In order to solve the problem of the imbalance between the fault data
and the normal ones in the fault diagnosis of transformer, we adopt k-means algorithm
to cluster the data. The result of clustering shows the existence of the boundary class
that is between fault and normal ones. The separation of boundary class from the fault
data and the normal ones improves the reliability and early warning ability of fault
diagnosis of transformer, as well as reduces the influence from the imbalance of the
two kinds of data.
Keywords:Clustering; fault diagnosis of transformer; k-means

1 Introduction

Power transformer is the key equipment in the power system. It is one of the main
factors that influence the security of power system. The transformer fault diagnosis
can improve the reliability and running safety of the power supply system, as well as
reduce the cost of the transformer maintenance and the economic consequences of the
transformer faults. It is a key issue of the security of power system [1-4]. Since
Dissolved Gases Analysis is used to fault diagnosis of transformer, the reliability of
the fault diagnosis is improved greatly. Therefore, it has become one of the most
effective ways of fault diagnosis [5]. The improved three ratio method is
recommended as a standard method for fault diagnosis in GB/T7252-2001 [1].
In recent years, scholars both at home and abroad make the dissolved gas in oil of
power transformer as the eigenvectors, then study and develop intelligent ways to
diagnose the fault of the transformer based on fuzzy math, neural network, grey
system and rough sets and so on. All of these play a significant role in fault diagnosis
of transformer [2-9]. However, neural network has the disadvantages such as local
optimum and computational complexity, and fuzzy theory also has some drawbacks in
determining membership function and fuzzy rules.
In the actual fault diagnosis of transformer, the fault data make up only a small
ratio, the majority of the data is the normal ones. The imbalance of the two types of
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978-1-4244-9690-7/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE


data brings challenges to the intelligent fault diagnosis. Considering the normal data
include boundary condition between the normal and fault. If we classify the data into
three categories: fault, boundary and normal, then we can not only weaken the
imbalance of the two kinds of data, but also can improve diagnostic system reliability
and the warning ability. In this paper, we cluster the data by k-means algorithm and
test the existence of boundary class so that the reliability of transformer fault
diagnosis system and warning ability can be improved.
The subsequent part of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces
k-means technology briefly. In Section 3, we apply Clustering to construct a model for
the fault diagnosis of transformer. Finally, the conclusions and some discussions for
future work are given in Section 4.

2 The basic principle of the clustering algorithm

Clustering is a process of dividing data sets into several subsets, and makes the
data of the same sets with a high similarity, while the data of different sets with low
similarity. The similarity can be described by various measures such as the distance,
inner product, and so on. The main ideology of cluster analysis is to achieve the
maximum similarity in the same sets while the minimum similarity in the different
sets >@. Cluster originated from all kinds of sciences, such as math, computer
science, statistics, biology and economics. Until now, clustering has made a lot of
successful applications.
Clustering analysis belongs to unsupervised learning. There are many kinds of
cluster algorithm, such as hierarchical clustering, k-means clustering, fuzzy
clustering, and so on. Among these algorithms, the k-means clustering is the most
commonly used. The following is a brief introduce for k-means algorithm >@.
The basic framework of K-means algorithm as follow:
Step 1: Give a dataset { X 1 , ", X N } and the number of clusters k. Let I=1 and
choose initial cluster centers {Z j : j = 1, 2, " , k} .
Step 2: Calculate the distance D( X i , Z j ( I )) between each data object and
cluster centre, where i = 1, " , N ; j = 1, " , k . If
D( X i , Z t ( I )) = min{D( X i , Z j ( I )) : j = 1, " , k}
then X i is assigned to the class t, notated as X i( t ) .


 Step 3: Calculate the new cluster centre:
nj
1
Z j ( I + 1) =
N
¦X
i =1
i 䯸 j = 1, 2," , k .
( j)

Step 4: if Z j ( I + 1) ≠ Z j ( I ), j = 1, " , k , then I=I+1, return to Step 2; otherwise

the algorithm is stopped.
The k-means algorithm is highly efficient and can deal with large dataset. Its
time complexity at each iteration is O (N*k*d) where d is the dimension of data
object. A drawback of k-means algorithm is that it is sensitive with the initial cluster
centers. If some priori knowledge is available for the initial cluster centers, then this
drawback can be effectively overcome.

3 Fault Diagnosis of Transformer Based on K-mens Clustering

The dataset from Henan province is used in our experiments. The dataset contains
1214 samples in which there are 54 fault data and the others are normal data. The
attributes of the dataset are methane, ethane attribute, ethane, acetylene, hydrogen,
carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide. We use k –means (k=3) to cluster all samples. The
three categories mean normal (Cluster 1), boundary (Cluster 2) and fault (Cluster 3).
Table 1 lists the results of the number of samples, centers and radius for three clusters.

Table 1 the number of samples, centers and radius for clusters

Clusters the number of samples The cluster center The radius

(5.5734,4.5853,1.1658,0.1252,30.7552,291.7202,9
Cluster 1 853 1879.6681
61.6509)

(21.3069,21.0745,8.1506,0.1943,25.5019,769.090
Cluster 2 305 3107.0310
0,4090.2810)

(49.7235,19.7078,8.8771,21.1476,889.3446,1056.
Cluster 3 56 8616.9166
1375,10187.3467)

The number of Cluster 1, Cluster 2 and Cluster 3 are respectively 853, 305 and 56.
There are 305 normal data and 2 normal data in Cluster 2 (boundary), which shows a
better performance compared with the two classifications. The separation of boundary


class from the fault data and the normal ones improves the reliability and early
warning ability of fault diagnosis of transformer, as well as reduces the influence from
the imbalance of the two kinds of data.

In order to show our cluster result more clearly, we get the average distances of
all kinds of point to the cluster centers and the average distances between clusters,
which are listed in Table 2 and Table 3 respectively.

Table 2 the average distances of all kinds of point to the cluster centers

Cluster 1 Cluster 2 Cluster 3

Cluster 1 625.1333 3175.3624 9300.9885
Cluster 2 3198.1591 1139.9431 6181.2675
Cluster 3 10062.3947 6967.3519 3046.7118

Table 3 the average distances between clusters

Cluster 1 Cluster 2 Cluster 3

Cluster 1 841.3684 3164.9324 9297.1847
Cluster 2 3164.9324 1538.6003 6164.7449
Cluster 3 9297.1847 6164.7449 4337.3206

According to the results, we can see the effect of clustering is wonderful. For
example, all the average distance with classes is smaller than that between classes.
Meanwhile, through the cluster radius, we also concluded that the fault data are very
scattered, and the normal and boundary ones are relative concentration. We can pay
more attention to the boundary data so that the accidents of transformer can be
effectually reduced.

4 Conclusions

In this paper, we effectively separate the boundary class from the normal class
and fault class three k - means algorithm, which can improve the reliability and early
warning ability of fault diagnosis of transformer. In addition, the separation of
boundary class is help to reduce the imbalance of the size between normal class and
fault class.


 The combination of cluster algorithm and classification algorithm for the fault
diagnosis of transformer can be considered as a future work.

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