Power transformer oil–paper insulation degradation modelling and prediction method based on functional principal component analysis

Abstract This study is for the case where the available data of power transformer oil–paper insulation is limited to a small amount furfural data, to solve the problems in oil–paper insulation degradation modelling, such as few samples available, unknown function form of the degradation process, differences of individual transformers among degradation processes, and commonality of degradation trends. A power transformer oil–paper insulation degradation modelling and prediction method based on functional principal component analysis (FPCA) is proposed. First, discrete furfural data of oil–paper insulation degradation are converted into continuous functional data, and the common degradation information of transformers is extracted based on functional time warping technology. Second, the principal components of insulation degradation are extracted based on FPCA method, and the difference of degradation information of individual transformers is obtained by analysing the differential of principal component scores. Subsequently, power transformer oil–paper insulation degradation model is constructed, and finally, the degradation model is updated based on Bayesian theory and the oil–paper insulation degradation is predicted. The example results show that compared with traditional transformer oil–paper insulation degradation modelling method, the proposed method has obvious superiority in model accuracy.