2nd IEEE International Conference on Power and Energy (PECon 08), December 1-3, 2008, Johor Baharu, Malaysia

Artificial Neural Network for Insulator Leakage

Currents Prediction from Environmental Data
A. Kazemi*, M.T.Hassanzadeh** and A.Gholami***
*

Iran University of Science and Technology/ Electrical Engineering Department, Tehran, Iran. Email:
kazemi@iust.ac.ir
** Iran University of Science and Technology/Electrical Engineering Department, Tehran, Iran. Email:
hasanzadeh@ee.iust.ac.ir
*** Iran University of Science and Technology/Electrical Engineering Department, Tehran, Iran. Email:
gholami@iust.ac.ir

addressing an effective solution against pollution

flashover. Meteorological conditions vary considerably
from the coastal areas to the inland areas and play an
important role in the deposition rate of pollutants and
electrical behavior of insulators. The survey proved
that the insulator contamination problem is strongly
environment-dependent and no generalized antipollution criteria can be offered. The determination of
outdoor insulation level and design, in a new location
is a difficult matter without having some information
on the severity of prevailing pollution. The problem
becomes more serious at higher levels of transmission
voltage where the higher insulation level is not
practical, technically and economically. It is, therefore,
imperative to have a reasonable and accurate
assessment of site severity. Works in [2-7] have found
considerable relationships between the contamination
severity in terms of Equivalent Salt Deposit Density
(ESDD) and flashover with respect to the
meteorological parameters. An attempt has been done
in [8] and [9] to relate most of the meteorological
parameters respectively with ESDD and leakage
current to develop a new mathematical model using
multiple regression analysis technique.
The southern region of Iran is considered as a
polluted area due to salty wind coming from the
Persian Gulf and Oman Sea. Therefore, the high
voltage insulators installed in this area should be
considered seriously with respect to other areas. The
site measurement of the pollution severity in terms of
leakage current with online leakage current analyzer
(OLCA) has been carried out with typical tension type
Cap-and-Pin porcelain insulators during dry season
under four varying meteorological factors such as
temperature, humidity, ultra violate radiance and wind
velocity.
In the last decade many research have been carried
out on the application of ANN in many fields. It has
been used successfully in pattern recognition of partial
discharges [10, 11] and in pollution discharge
modeling [12]. In this paper a new approach using
ANN as function estimator has been developed and
used to model accurately the relationship between
leakage current (the dependent factor) and the
meteorological parameters (the independent factors)
such as temperature, humidity, ultra violate radiance
and wind speed. Among the various artificial neural

AbstractThe reliability of the power system mainly

depends on the environmental and weather conditions
which cause flashover on polluted insulators leading to
system outages.
It is generally recognized that the main causes leading to
the contamination of insulators are marine pollutionfound in the immediate neighborhood of the coastal
regions and solid pollution-found in the dense industrial
areas. This research is directed towards the study of
contamination of insulator under marine pollution.
The leakage currents of porcelain insulators were
monitored together with environmental data at a coastal
test site in south of Iran. In this paper it is shown how,
using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) as a function
estimator; the daily variation of leakage current can be
predicted accurately from temperature, humidity, wind
velocity and ultraviolet radiance.
KeywordsHigh Voltage Indulator; ANN; Meteorological
Conditions

I.
INTRODUCTION
With the ever increasing demand for electrical
power, there has been a steady growth in transmission
line voltages required for optimum and economic
transfer of large blocks of power over long distances.
As the level of transmission voltage is increased,
switching and dynamic overvoltages and withstand
ability of the insulator under polluted conditions have
become most important factors in determining the
insulation level of the system. At the coastal areas the
high voltage insulators are affected by salt particles
that settle on the insulators surfaces. The winds that
blow from the sea carry the salt particles. These
particles are not dangerous in its dry condition but with
high environmental humidity or drizzle rain conditions
the salt can absorb the water and form thin film with
high conductivity. This layer gives an ideal path for the
leakage current to pass through between the high
voltage side and the ground side. High failure rate of
polluted insulator due to the flashover has been found
near the coastal areas [1].
Contamination monitoring is required in order to
determine the proper design and choice of insulation
type and level. This monitoring is also important for

1-4244-2405-4/08/$20.00 2008 IEEE

13

2nd IEEE International Conference on Power and Energy (PECon 08), December 1-3, 2008, Johor Baharu, Malaysia

output layer through the hidden layers. Each neuron of

the output layer receives a signal from all input via
hidden layer neurons along connections with
modifiable weights. The neural network can identify
input pattern vectors, once the connection weights are
adjusted by means of the learning process. The back
propagation learning algorithm [15] which is a
generalization of Widrow-Hoff error correction rule is
the most popular method in training the ANN and is
employed in this work.

networks presented so far, the multi-layer feed forward

neural network is employed in this study. It is found
that the ANN modeling is very effective and accurate
to determine leakage current daily variation.
II.

ONSITE MEASUREMENTS & RESEARCH

METHODOLOGY
The approach that has been used to address the
pollution severity at the test location is called leakage
current stated in units of mA. The site measurement
activities are carried out daily during dry season in a
test station in south of Iran with samples of typical
Cap-and-Pin porcelain insulators which are commonly
installed on transmission lines in that area. Leakage
currents of porcelain insulators under four varying
meteorological factors e.g. temperature (T), humidity
(H), ultra violates radiance (UV), wind velocity (WV)
are measured during sixty days.
Efficient modeling of pollution severity and
flashover voltage is of paramount interest to all
engineers involved in the design of transmission line
insulators. Among the various artificial neural network
presented so far, the multi-layer feed-forward network
with back propagation technique is employed in the
present study to model leakage current = f (T, H, UV,
WV). The neural network is trained with the help of
data obtained from site measurement and the training
accuracy has been assessed by root mean square error
(RMSE).

IV. PRE-PROCESSING OF DATA

Scaling of the input-output data has a significant
influence on the convergence property and also on the
accuracy of the learning process. It is obvious from the
sigmoid activation function that the range of the output
of the network must be within (0, 1). Moreover, the
input variables should be kept small in order to avoid
saturation effect caused by the sigmoid function. Thus,
the input-output data must be normalized before the
initiation of training of the neural network. After the
normalization, the input variables can then be easily
made to fall in the range (-1, 1). Further, the range of
the normalized output vector component is made to fall
within (0, 1)[13].
V. PROBLEM DESCRIPTION
The proposed modeling of pollution severity in
terms of leakage current is done with the help of data
obtained from site measurement performed in south of
Iran. The meteorological parameters on which the
value of leakage current depends are: Temperature in
Co, Humidity in %, Ultra Violate radiance in w/m2 and
Wind velocity in m/s. In this paper, leakage current = f
(T,H,UV,WV) modeling has been attempted based on
artificial neural network instead of any empirical
approach. Out of 200 data sets collected from site
measurement, 150 sets of input/output patterns are used
as Training Data Set in the training process. Each
training presentation contains four input nodes
characterizing meteorological parameters (T, H,
UV,WV) and one output node which provides
corresponding values of leakage current. Once the
neural network is trained by using 40 training sets, it is
tested using 4 Test Data Set selected randomly from
the remaining 50 data set. All inputs and outputs in the
training patterns are normalized within the respective
ranges as per different normalizing schemes, before
they are used for neural network training and testing.
Finally, with the help of input pattern vectors of rest 16
data set estimated values of leakage current are
computed using the trained ANN model i.e. leakage
current = f (T, H, UV, WV) and are plotted against the
measured leakage current values as shown in Fig. 3.

III. ANN ALGORITHM

Artificial neural network algorithm has been used
successfully in many applications. It is useful because
it acts as a model of real-world system or function. The
model then stands for the system it represents, typically
to predict or to control it. ANN can model a function
even if the equation describing it is unknown the only
prerequisite is representative sample of the function
behavior and that is from the experimental data and not
from a theoretical understanding. Fig. 1 shows the
schematic diagram of a multi-layer feed forward
network used in this paper. The neurons in the network
can be divided into three layers: input layer, output
layer and hidden layers.

Figure 1.

VI. DETAILS OF WORK DONE

In applying the learning rule described, there are
several issues which should be addressed. The
optimization process has been carried out based on
RMSE, less oscillation in the error of convergence and
mean average error (MAE) of the test data. From the
results in Tables I-V, the observations that can be made
are:

The structure of a multi-layer neural network

It is important to note that the feed forward network

signals can only propagate from the input layer to the

14

2nd IEEE International Conference on Power and Energy (PECon 08), December 1-3, 2008, Johor Baharu, Malaysia

of the model output is found to be 9.11%. Moreover,

measured and estimated data of leakage current have
been plotted for twenty tests chosen randomly from the
data collected at the site.

A. Normalization Method
For the convention learning algorithm with the
choice of learning rate (lr) =0.2, momentum constant
(mc) =0.9 and eight hidden layers nodes, the best
normalization scheme is being optimized in Table I.
The number of iterations used in the training process is
3500. The results of Table I indicate that the maximinmaximin normalization is the best choice for the
present work. It can be seen that the desired RMSE is
reach almost in all states, but the authors focused on
the minimum MAE% of test data.
B. Optimum Learning Rate and Momentum Constant
Most of the works on feed forward neural nets use
constant values of lr and mc. Rumelhart [13]
recommended that a combination of lr =0.25, mc =0.9
can yield good results for most problems. But there is
still no consensus as to what values of lr and mc should
be used in the learning process; rather, the optimal
values of lr and mc may be problem dependent. In the
present work, extensive studies have been carried out
on the effect of different values of lr and mc on the
convergence rate of the learning method as well as
MAE are given in Table II. It is evident from Table II
that the best MAE is obtained i.e. 0.4715 for lr =0.02
and mc =0.9. So the combination of lr =0.02 and mc
=0.9 is the best choice with twenty one nodes in the
hidden layer. The number of iterations used in the
training process is 185.

Figure 2. MSE variation in terms of epochs

TABLE I.
NO. OF HIDDEN LAYERS=1, NO. OF HIDDEN LAYER NODES=8,
LR=0.2, MC=0.9
No
1
2

C. Number of Input and Hidden Layer Nodes

As evident from Table III the number input layer
nodes is not a constant factor, rather, it is also problem
dependent. Also,the number of Hidden layer nodes is
varied from 15 to 23. As seen from the result of Table
IV, the best MAE is obtained with 21 nodes. Thus, for
the present work, on the basis of minimum MAE with
less oscillation, the numbers of nodes in the hidden and
input layer are optimized respectively at twenty one and
twelve nodes.

Input
Maxi
min
Mean
& SD

Outpu
t
Maxi
min
Mean
& SD

RMSE

Iterat
ions

MAE

Comments

9.96E-11

250

0.3955

Without
oscillations

0.1696

Infini
te

---

divergent

TABLE II.
NO. OF HIDDEN LAYERS=1, NO. OF HIDDEN LAYERS NODES=8,
INPUT=MAXIMIN AND OUTPUT=MAXIMIN

D. Number of Hidden Layers and Training Method

Table V compares the effect of number of hidden
layers on the MAE of the training process. It is found
that, using three hidden layers has definitely a better
effect on the MAE than when one hidden layer is used,
with same number of hidden layer nodes in other cases.
When three hidden layers are used, the RMS error is
increased slightly but the MAE decreased. Thus, in the
present work, the test output results are calculated,
using three hidden layers with twenty one nodes in
each.
It is note that various training methods such as
Traingdx, Trainrp, Trainbr and Traingd are used, but all
of them discard because deficiencies like less accuracy,
high oscillation and divergence. So, Trainlm selected as
the optimum training method.

No

lr

mc

RMSE

Iterati
ons

MAE

0.2

0.9

9.92E-11

241

0.5064

0.25

0.9

7.47E-11

33

0.5831

0.2

0.8

9.94E-11

302

0.5577

0.1

0.8
5

7.54E-11

33

0.5070

0.3

0.8

9.93E-11

289

0.5072

0.05

0.9

9.96E-11

240

0.6153

0.02

0.9

9.95E-11

291

0.4715

Comments
Without
oscillations
Without
oscillations
Without
oscillations
Without
oscillations
Without
oscillations
Without
oscillations
Without
oscillations

VII. CONCLUSION
In this paper, ANN has been applied successfully in
pollution severity measurement studies for function
estimation, which is a major ANN application.
Modeling of the complex non-linear function leakage
current=f (T, H, UV, WV), the equation which is
unknown, has been accomplished accurately. Further
comparative analysis of the estimated results with the
measured data collected from the site measurement
amply demonstrate the effectiveness of the use of ANN
in modeling a system from the results of the site
measurement only, where the real-world system has an
unknown nonlinear relationship. Especially, for
phenomenon such as leakage current it can predict the
variation procedure successfully.

E. Results
The modeled output of the test data computed with
help of best combination of the modifiable parameters
are tabulated against the target output, that is, data
obtained from site measurements in Table VII. The
MSE error obtained in the training process for 19
iterations is 9.43E-17 and the mean absolute error MAE

15

2nd IEEE International Conference on Power and Energy (PECon 08), December 1-3, 2008, Johor Baharu, Malaysia

The estimation of critical contamination level in

terms of leakage current will help in the establishment
of maintenance policy and for addressing an effective
solution against pollution flashover of high voltage
insulators.

TABLE V.
NO. OF HIDDEN LAYERS=1, NO. OF HIDDEN LAYER NODES=8,
INPUT=MAXIMIN AND OUTPUT=MAXIMIN, LR=0.02, MC=0.9, NO. OF
INPUT LAYER NODES=12

TABLE III.
NO. OF HIDDEN LAYERS=1, NO. OF HIDDEN LAYER NODES=8,
INPUT=MAXIMIN AND OUTPUT=MAXIMIN, LR=0.02, MC=0.

No

No of
Input
Layer
Nodes

RMSE

Iteration
s

MAE

9.99E-11

421

0.48

0.92

9.94E-11

317

0.5877

9.98E-11

186

0.5034

9.79E-11

1108

0.5600

8.74E-11

29

0.5023

10

6.16E-11

38

0.5000

11

9.93E-11

251

0.5972

12

9.99E-11

236

0.4672

No

RMSE

15

9.95E-11

Iterations

180

MAE

0.5312

16

7.78E-11

29

0.5290

17

9.97E-11

234

0.5492

18

9.94E-11

337

.05143

19

4.43E-14

27

0.5199

20

9.94E-11

261

0.5172

21

9.88E-11

185

0.4520

22

5.72E-11

25

0.5732

23

7.04E-11

31

0.5151

No of
Hidden
Layers

RMSE

Iterations

MAE

21

9.88E-11

185

0.4520

21,21

2.04E-17

0.3942

21,21,21

9.43E-17

19

0.2743

21,21,21,21

4.15E-17

10

0.4707

Comments
Without
oscillations
divergent
Without
oscillations
Without
oscillations
Without
oscillations
Without
oscillations
Without
oscillations
Without
oscillations
Without
oscillations

TABLE IV.
NO. OF HIDDEN LAYERS=1, NO. OF HIDDEN LAYER NODES=8,
INPUT=MAXIMIN AND OUTPUT=MAXIMIN, LR=0.02, MC=0.9, NO. OF
INPUT LAYER NODES=12
No of
Nodes in
Hidden
Layer

No

Comments
Without
oscillations
Without
oscillations
Without
oscillations
Without
oscillations

Figure 3. Leakage current prediction for 20 days

TABLE VI.
THE OPTIMUM ANN CHARACTERISTICS

Comments
Without
oscillations
Without
oscillations
Without
oscillations
Without
oscillations
Without
oscillations
Without
oscillations
Without
oscillations
Without
oscillations
Without
oscillations

ANN Elements

Description

No of Input layer Nodes

12

No of Hidden layers

No of Hidden layers Nodes

21

lr

0.02

mc

0.9

Input

maximin

Output

maximin

Training method

trainlm

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors express their special thanks to managing
directors of Hormozgan utilities and their staff for their
great supports in this research program. Special thanks
are giving to Mr. Shariati and, Mr.Sheikholharam and
Mr.Behzadian for their cooperation and assistance in
this research.

16

2nd IEEE International Conference on Power and Energy (PECon 08), December 1-3, 2008, Johor Baharu, Malaysia

TABLE VII.
THE COMPARISON OF PREDICTED AND MEASURED LEAKAGE CURRENT VALUES
Wind velocity
(WV)
m/s
Range
(1.26-3.64)
2.89
2.09
1.34
1.62
1.74
3.42
1.54

Humidity (H)
%
Range
(40-85)

Temperature
(T) Co
Rang
(26-32)

63.80
67.18
78.35
85.61
53.73
76.83
75.03

30.54
31.18
31.49
31.64
31.52
29.49
30.32

UV
(W/m2)
radiation
Range
(40-84)
81.37
82.77
73.63
73.24
77.38
77.73
69.89
[7]

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17

Measured
leakage current
(mA)
Range
(0.43-2.41)
2.28
1.39
1.63
1.66
1.60
1.61
1.42

Predicted
leakage current

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1.48

MAE%

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