Fault Diagnosis of an Excitation System Using a Fuzzy Neural Network Optimized by a Novel Adaptive Grey Wolf Optimizer

As the excitation system is the core control component of a synchronous condenser system, its fault diagnosis is crucial for maximizing the reactive power compensation capability of the synchronous condenser. To achieve accurate diagnosis of excitation system faults, this paper proposes a novel adaptive grey wolf optimizer (AGWO) to optimize the initial weights and biases of the fuzzy neural network (FNN), thereby enhancing the diagnostic performance of the FNN model. Firstly, an improved nonlinear convergence factor is introduced to balance the algorithm’s global exploration and local exploitation capabilities. Secondly, a new adaptive position update strategy that enhances the interaction capability of the position information is proposed to improve the algorithm’s ability to jump out of the local optimum and accelerate the convergence speed. In addition, it is demonstrated that the proposed AGWO algorithm has global convergence. By selecting real fault waveforms of the excitation system for case validation, the results show that the proposed AGWO has a better convergence performance compared to the grey wolf optimizer (GWO), particle swarm optimization (PSO), whale optimization algorithm (WOA), and marine predator algorithm (MPA). Specifically, compared to the FNN and GWO-FNN models, the AGWO-FNN model improves average diagnostic accuracy on the test set by 4.2% and 2.5%, respectively. Therefore, the proposed AGWO-FNN effectively enhances the accuracy of fault diagnosis in the excitation system and exhibits stronger diagnostic capability.