Stacked Auto-Encoder-Based Transients Recognition in VSC-HVDC

For overhead long-distance high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission lines, transients are produced due to complicated field conditions and lightning activities. To ensure reliable operation of protection devices, accurate recognition of faults and disturbances is quite critical. The most popular recognition methods include threshold-based ones which require the proper setting of the threshold value, and classifier-based ones that need suitable feature extractions. These methods depend heavily on the experience of engineers or experts and are ineffective in dealing with the variation of system parameters. In this paper, a transient recognition method based on stack auto-encoder (SAE) is proposed to characterize different transients and to avoid human interferences. A symmetrical +/- 500kv HVDC system is modeled to illustrate the performance of the proposed method. The effect of some factors, such as noises and conductors, are discussed and compared. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed SAE-based recognition has excellent potential in transient recognition of practical HVDC systems.