Infrared Thermal Image-Based Sustainable Fault Detection for Electrical Facilities

Faults in electrical facilities may cause severe damages, such as the electrocution of maintenance personnel, which could be fatal, or a power outage. To detect electrical faults safely, electricians disconnect the power or use heavy equipment during the procedure, thereby interrupting the power supply and wasting time and money. Therefore, detecting faults with remote approaches has become important in the sustainable maintenance of electrical facilities. With technological advances, methodologies for machine diagnostics have evolved from manual procedures to vibration-based signal analysis. Although vibration-based prognostics have shown fine results, various limitations remain, such as the necessity of direct contact, inability to detect heat deterioration, contamination with noise signals, and high computation costs. For sustainable and reliable operation, an infrared thermal (IRT) image detection method is proposed in this work. The IRT image technique is used in various engineering fields for diagnosis because of its non-contact, safe, and highly reliable heat detection technology. To explore the possibility of using the IRT image-based fault detection approach, object detection algorithms (Faster R-CNN; Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Network, YOLOv3; You Only Look Once version 3) are trained using 16,843 IRT images from power distribution facilities. A thermal camera expert from Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Corporation (KHNP) takes pictures of the facilities regarding various conditions, such as the background of the image, surface status of the objects, and weather conditions. The detected objects are diagnosed through a thermal intensity area analysis (TIAA). The faster R-CNN approach shows better accuracy, with a 63.9% mean average precision (mAP) compared with a 49.4% mAP for YOLOv3. Hence, in this study, the Faster R-CNN model is selected for remote fault detection in electrical facilities.