Incipient Stator Insulation Fault Detection of Permanent Magnet Synchronous Wind Generators Based on Hilbert–Huang Transformation

Incipient stator winding fault in permanent magnet synchronous wind generators (PMSWGs) is very difficult to be detected as the fault generated variations in terminal electrical parameters are very weak and chaotic. This paper simulates the incipient stator winding faults at different degree of insulation degradation of one turn in the winding of a PMSWG. Cosimulation method by combining finite element model and external circuits is used. Hilbert–Huang transformation is applied to detect the very early stage fault in interturn insulation by analyzing the stator current. Detection results show that the minimum detectable severity degree of interturn fault in this paper is 0.1488%, which is much better than the best record in the literature.