Yuehua Li

During transformer operation, long-term vibration causes the winding to loosen axially. When hit by a short-circuit, the winding deforms to different extents. Thus, identifying early looseness faults in transformer windings is vital for power systems’ stability. To address issues including scarce vibration data across multiple load conditions for transformer winding looseness faults, inadequate extraction of two-dimensional spectrogram features, and the inability to boost recognition accuracy caused by overfitting during fault recognition model training, this study constructed a 10 kV power transformer vibration test platform. It measured the vibration signals on the box surface under various winding looseness conditions and built a time–frequency-domain vibration spectrum library for different load currents. Then, a fault identification model based on vibration spectra and ConvNeXt was constructed, and model verification and analysis were carried out. The results indicate that after training, the fault recognition accuracy of the spectrum containing three load conditions is comparable to that of a single load condition. The average recognition accuracy at six box-surface measuring points reaches 97.9%. Moreover, the ConvNeXt model outperforms the traditional ResNet50 by 1.2%. This new model effectively addresses overfitting and offers strong technical support for detecting different transformer winding looseness faults.