Disruptive failures threaten the reliability of electric supply in power branches, often indicated by the rise of leakage current in distribution insulators. This paper presents a novel, hybrid method for fault prediction based on the time series of the leakage current of contaminated insulators. In a controlled high-voltage laboratory simulation, 15 kV-class insulators from an electrical power distribution network were exposed to increasing contamination in a salt chamber. The leakage current was recorded over 28 h of effective exposure, culminating in a flashover in all considered insulators. This flashover event served as the prediction mark that this paper proposes to evaluate. The proposed method applies the Christiano-Fitzgerald random walk (CFRW) filter for trend decomposition and the group data-handling (GMDH) method for time series prediction. The CFRW filter, with its versatility, proved to be more effective than the seasonal decomposition using moving averages in reducing non-linearities. The CFRW-GMDH method, with a root-mean-squared error of 3.44×10-12, outperformed both the standard GMDH and long short-term memory models in fault prediction. This superior performance suggested that the CFRW-GMDH method is a promising tool for predicting faults in power grid insulators based on leakage current data. This approach can provide power utilities with a reliable tool for monitoring insulator health and predicting failures, thereby enhancing the reliability of the power supply.
Keywords: Christiano–Fitzgerald random walk filter; electrical power grids; group method of data handling; leakage current; time series forecasting.