Maximum Fourier spectrum cyclostationarity blind deconvolution and its application in structural health monitoring of power transformers

Abstract Power transformer is the most important equipment that affects whether the electric power system can be operated safely and normally, whose condition assessment problem has attracted considerable attention. Background noise frequently affects the effectiveness of nonintrusive techniques based on vibro-acoustic signals for structural health monitoring in power transformers. In this scenario, the Fourier spectrum cyclostationarity index (FSC) is designed based on the cyclostationarity index used for rotating machinery fault diagnosis to construct a maximum FSC blind deconvolution method (MFSCBD) for transformer fault detection in this paper. Firstly, the limitations of the traditional blind deconvolution (BD) in transformer fault detection are discussed in the mathematical principle. Then, a new BD framework based on Kepler optimization algorithm is proposed according to the principle of convex optimization to address the problems of difficulty in solving the complex blind objective function in the traditional differential BD framework and the ill-condition problem in the Rayleigh quotient BD framework. Subsequently, a synthetic nonstationary and nonlinear simulation signal is constructed for numerical verification, and a six-microphone array is designed to obtain the practical signals from the operating transformer to verify the performance of MFSCBD. Finally, the applications on the simulated and experimental signals of power transformers demonstrate that MFSCBD outperforms complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise and successive variational mode decomposition to some extent for structural health monitoring.