Time-Delay Estimation for Partial Discharge in Arresters Using Joint Denoising and HB-Weighted Cross-Correlation

Partial discharge (PD) detection is a crucial means for the early warning of incipient insulation defects in arresters. However, under strong electromagnetic interference and background noise, PD signals are prone to distortion, making it difficult to accurately determine the pulse onset front and thus severely degrading the accuracy of time-delay estimation. To address the difficulty of time-delay estimation under low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and multi-channel aliasing conditions, this paper proposes a method for arrester PD detection and high-precision time-delay estimation based on joint denoising and improved cross-correlation. First, a joint denoising strategy that integrates singular value decomposition (SVD), variational mode decomposition adaptively optimized by the sparrow search algorithm (SSA-VMD), and the Teager energy operator (TEO) is constructed. This strategy suppresses white noise and periodic narrowband interference while effectively extracting the oscillatory onset characteristics of PD pulses. Second, an enhanced time-delay estimation method based on HB-weighted generalized quadratic cross-correlation is introduced. By employing the dual mechanisms of HB frequency-domain weighting and amplitude weighting to sharpen the correlation peak, the estimation robustness under low SNR is improved. Simulation results show that the proposed method attains an accuracy of 99.9911%, significantly outperforming conventional cross-correlation, PHAT-SCOT, and NLMS methods. Finally, experiments are conducted on a needle-plate discharge platform. In multiple comparative experiments with different spatial distance differences (ranging from <30 cm to >50 cm), the maximum relative error is kept within 0.6%, verifying the reliability and accuracy of the proposed algorithm under controlled laboratory conditions. This method can provide a new approach for online monitoring and accurate fault location of arresters in power systems.