Fault diagnosis technology of power transformers is essential for the stable operation of power systems. Fault diagnosis technology based on dissolved gas analysis (DGA) is one of the most commonly used methods. However, due to the lack of fault information, traditional DGA fault diagnosis techniques are difficult to meet increasing power demand in terms of accuracy and efficiency. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel fault diagnosis model for oil-immersed transformers based on International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) ratio methods and probabilistic neural network (PNN) optimized with the modified moth flame optimization algorithm (MMFO). PNN as a radial neural network has good utility and is often used in classification models, but its classification performance is easily affected by the smoothing factor (σ) of the hidden layer and is not stable. This paper addresses this issue using the MMFO to optimize the smoothing factor, which effectively improves the classification accuracy and robustness of PNN. The proposed method was validated by conducting the experiments with the real data collected from transformers. Experimental results show that the MMFO-PNN model improves the fault diagnosis accuracy rate from 70.65 to 99.04%, which is higher than other power transformer fault diagnosis models.
© 2021 The Authors. Published by American Chemical Society.