Synthetic high impedance fault data through deep convolutional generated adversarial network

High impedance faults (HIFs) have always been significant challenges in the power grids. Researchers have developed some advanced protective methods to detect the HIFs. To test and validate these methods, large amounts of HIF data are required. This paper presents a synthetic HIF data generating method using the deep convolutional generated adversarial network (DCGAN). The DCGAN includes a generator module to create synthetic HIF waveform from random noises; and a discriminator module to identify the flaws of those synthetic data, which ultimately helps improve the quality of the synthetic data created by the generator. To test the fidelity of the generated synthetic HIF data, two different HIF-detection methods have been applied. Extensive simulation results have validated the effectiveness of using the DCGAN to create synthetic HIF data.