Physics-Informed SDAE-Based Denoising Model for High-Impedance Fault Detection

The accurate detection of high-impedance faults (HIFs) in distribution systems is fundamentally dependent on the extraction of weak fault signatures. However, these features are often obscured by complex and high-level noise present in current transformer (CT) measurement data. To address this challenge, an energy-proportion-guided channel-wise attention stacked denoising autoencoder (EPGCA-SDAE) model is proposed. In this model, wavelet decomposition is employed to transform the signal into informative frequency band components. A channel attention mechanism is utilized to adaptively assign weights to each component, thereby enhancing model interpretability. Furthermore, a physics-informed prior, based on energy distribution, is introduced to guide the loss function and regulate the attention learning process. Extensive simulations using both synthetic and real-world 10kV distribution network data are conducted. The superiority of the EPGCA-SDAE over traditional wavelet-based methods, stacked denoising autoencoders (SDAE), denoising convolutional neural network (DnCNN), and Transformer-based networks across various noise conditions is demonstrated. The lowest average mean squared error (MSE) is achieved by the proposed model (simulated: 50.60×10−5p.u.; real: 76.45×10−5p.u.), along with enhanced noise robustness, generalization capability, and physical interpretability. These results verify the method’s feasibility within the tested 10 kV distribution system, providing a reliable data recovery framework for fault diagnosis in noise-contaminated distribution network environments.