T-HMM-Based Transformer Fault Diagnosis in Grid-Connected Renewable Energy Systems

Abstract

Addressing multi-factor coupling, progressive degradation, and time-varying operating conditions in substation equipment under high-penetration renewable energy integration, this paper proposes a Time-varying Hidden Markov Model (T-HMM) for transformer fault diagnosis using multi-source heterogeneous data. Unlike conventional HMM with fixed transition matrices and initial parameter sensitivity, the proposed framework introduces a forgetting-factor-driven online transition matrix updating mechanism, enabling adaptive state tracking under varying operating conditions. A multi-dimensional feature system is constructed incorporating fundamental state, coupling correlation, and temporal evolution characteristics, with state-dependent sliding window standardization and adaptive wavelet denoising to enhance early-stage fault discriminability. Parameter optimization employs pre-clustering and multi-start strategies to circumvent local optima in the Baum–Welch algorithm, while an improved decoding strategy achieves real-time health state identification and multi-step probability prediction. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method accurately tracks state evolution trends and effectively identifies fault categories, achieving significantly superior state recognition accuracy and multi-step prediction hit rates compared to conventional HMM, with substantially reduced mean absolute error. The method effectively captures subtle precursors during normal-to-fault transitions, providing reliable theoretical foundations for early fault warning and condition-based maintenance.