Electric Bicycle Series Arc Fault Identification Method Based on Improved PCA and SVM

Electric bicycles are popular due to their environmental benefits and convenience. However, electric bicycle fires caused by series arc faults remain a serious safety concern. This study focuses on series arc fault identification for electric bicycles under complex operating conditions, covering state of charge (SoC), torque, and speed variations, and simultaneously considers normal state, DC-side series arc fault, and AC-side series arc fault conditions. Five time-domain features, namely root mean square (RMS), standard deviation (STD), skewness (SK), kurtosis (KUR), and current amplitude (CA), and three frequency-domain features, namely amplitude–frequency energy (AFE), amplitude–frequency mean (AFM), and amplitude–frequency kurtosis (AFK), are extracted. An improved principal component analysis (PCA)-based feature fusion method transforms the eight original time–frequency features into a five-dimensional PCA-fused feature representation consisting of PC1, PC2, PC3, fused PC4–PC7, and PC8. The fused features are classified using a radial basis function (RBF)-support vector machine (SVM) model. The proposed method achieves 98.68% test accuracy, 0.9869 Macro-F1, and 0.9931 Macro-AUC. A classifier comparison and feature-level latency analysis are also provided to clarify the accuracy–cost tradeoff and deployment feasibility. The results indicate that the proposed method can provide an interpretable and lightweight solution for electric bicycle controllers, battery management systems (BMSs), and onboard safety-monitoring applications.