Intelligent fault diagnosis in power distribution networks using LSTM-DenseNet network

This paper introduces a novel fault diagnosis method that combines DenseNet and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. The DenseNet utilizes its unique dense block structure to detect subtle variations in three-phase voltage and zero-sequence current signals. In addition, the Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) module is introduced in DenseNet. The SE module enhances DenseNet's feature representation by adapting the importance of each channel in the feature map. Furthermore, integrating the LSTM model enables capturing time-domain features of fault signals, enhancing the analysis of waveform changes and trends. These extracted features are subsequently fused in a cascaded manner, leveraging the strengths of both approaches to obtain a more comprehensive information representation. To better explain the capability of feature extraction in each part of the model, t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) method is used for visual analysis. The proposed method is evaluated using two distribution network models, namely the 10 kV and IEEE34 networks, in simulation. The verification results indicate that the proposed method achieves exceptionally high accuracy in fault identification for both tested distribution network models, with rates of 99.87 % and 99.82 %, respectively, while also demonstrating robust performance in noisy environments. This performance surpasses that of other related methods, underscoring the enhanced effectiveness of our approach.