Optical fibre based quench detection in HTS applications using machine learning classifiers

摘要: A Mach-Zehnder Interferometer (MZI) based optical fibre sensing technique, developed and patented by EPFL, is an efficient and economical way to detect hotspots in High Temperature Superconductor (HTS) applications. Due to the MZI sensitivity being a composite of strain sensitive and temperature sensitive contributions, the MZI gives an instantaneous response to a quench (within 10 ms), because of the quick strain transfer to the optical fibre. However, the MZI output signal can also manifest the environmental noise caused by mechanical vibrations, bubbling in the cryostat and temperature variations, along with the response to the quench. This presents the problems of false alarms and indiscernible response to a quench. Discrete wavelet transform (DWT) has been proven to be a useful tool for feature extraction in different fields requiring signal categorization and hence holds the potential to enable quench …