Lightweight CNN-Based Anomaly Detection for High Voltage Converter Modulators in the Spallation Neutron Source
Authors: Alberto D. Cencillo, Leonardo Concepción, Julián Luengo, Isaac Triguero
Organizations: 1Andalusian Research Institute in Data Science and Computational Intelligence (DaSCI) · Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (DECSAI),May University of Granada, Granada, 18071, Spain
Abstract
Unscheduled trips of high-power pulsed converters are a leading source of downtime at large accelerator facilities. At the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), the High Voltage Converter Modulators (HVCMs) are consistently the second-largest contributor to lost beam time. Each HVCM pulse is recorded across sensor channels spanning currents, voltages, and magnetic fluxes, whose mutual interactions encode the operating state of the system. Fault precursors do not manifest uniformly across these channels: depending on fault type, they may alter the temporal structure of individual signals, change the statistical dependencies among channels, or both. Existing deep-learning approaches typically process multi-channel signals with standard convolutional pipelines that entangle temporal and cross-channel operations from the first layer, giving the model no explicit mechanism to represent channel independence or structured inter-channel interaction. We hypothesise that architectural inductive bias, specifically the ordering of temporal filtering and cross-channel mixing, plays a central role in detection performance on this class of data. To test this, we vary the order in which these two operations are applied, and examine whether per-pulse adaptive channel reweighting further improves sensitivity. Evaluated on the public HVCM dataset across all four SNS subsystems (RFQ, DTL, CCL, SCL), our best variant achieves a pooled AUC-PR of 0.816 and AUC-ROC of 0.934, outperforming the state of the art on most subsystems and five of the six fault families. Ablations identify three dominant input channels and link per-fault-family performance to whether precursors manifest as amplitude shifts in individual channels or as subtler patterns requiring joint channel representations to surface.
Always-on converter health monitoring demands sub-mW edge inference, a regime inaccessible to GPU-based physics-informed neural networks. This work separates spiking temporal processing from physics enforcement: a three-layer leaky integrate-and-fire SNN estimates passive component parameters while a differentiable ODE solver provides physics-consistent training by decoupling the ODE physics loss from the unrolled spiking loop. On an EMI-corrupted synchronous buck converter benchmark, the SNN reduces lumped resistance error from 25.8% to 10.2% versus a feedforward baseline, within the ±10% manufacturing tolerance of passive components, at a projected ∼270× energy reduction on neuromorphic hardware. Persistent membrane states further enable degradation tracking and event-driven fault detection via a +5.5 percentage-point spike-rate jump at abrupt faults. With 93% spike sparsity, the architecture is suited for always-on deployment on Intel Loihi 2 or BrainChip Akida.
The growing use of fast-switching power electronics has made partial discharge (PD) analysis under switching-voltage excitation increasingly important, yet more challenging than under sinusoidal conditions due to activity concentrated at voltage transitions. This work presents an Amplitude-Width-Area (AWA) pattern representation for source-oriented PD analysis under switching-voltage excitation. In the proposed method, time domain PD pulses are characterized using pulse amplitude, width, and area, and mapped into a visual pattern where amplitude and area define the coordinate axes and width is encoded by color. The generated AWA patterns are used to distinguish six single and mixed PD source conditions: corona, internal, surface, corona+internal, corona+surface, and internal+surface. To evaluate the classification capability of the proposed representation, a Random Forest baseline and two Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models, InceptionV3 and ResNet-18, are compared. The AWA patterns show distinguishable source-dependent distributions, and CNN-based classification achieves testing accuracy above 96%, compared with 73.33% for Random Forest. The results indicate that AWA patterns provide a visual representation of PD pulses suitable for multi-class PD source classification under switching-voltage excitation.
More Electric Aircraft require fast and reliable monitoring of high-frequency electrical networks, yet most power quality disturbance and fault diagnosis methods are developed for conventional 50 or 60 Hz grids. This work presents a hardware-aware deep learning framework for multiclass detection of electrical faults and power quality disturbances in a 400 Hz aerospace power system. A high-fidelity simulation model inspired by the Boeing 787 electrical architecture generates voltage and current waveforms for 21 normal, disturbance, switching, open-circuit, and short-circuit conditions. Two datasets, each containing 73,500 samples, are formed from one-dimensional time-series signals and short-time Fourier transform time-frequency representations. Signal-processing augmentation, domain randomization, and class-specific generative adversarial networks increase waveform diversity, and the time-series dataset is released through IEEE DataPort. We compare 1D and 2D convolutional neural networks, long short-term memory networks, CNN-LSTM hybrids, ResNet, MobileNet, and VGG models under common training conditions. A compact ResNet provides the best accuracy-complexity tradeoff, achieving 96.94 percent software test accuracy with 175,685 parameters. After 8-bit quantization and deployment on a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale Plus MPSoC ZCU102, the model achieves 95.87 percent accuracy and a measured mean neural-network accelerator latency of 6.90 ms per input record. The results establish simulation-based, accelerator-level feasibility for embedded edge AI in aircraft electrical health monitoring and motivate future end-to-end data acquisition and experimental validation.