A Field Verification Denoising Method for Partial Discharge Ultrasonic Sensors Based on IPSO-Optimated Multivariate Variational Mode Decomposition Combined with Improved Wavelet Transforms

Field verification of contact-type ultrasonic sensors enables rapid evaluation of their sensitivity performance, thereby ensuring the accuracy of partial discharge (PD) ultrasonic monitoring results. However, during the verification process, both the standard sensor and the sensor under testing are inevitably affected by ambient noise when receiving verification signals, which can result in significant errors in the verification outcome. To address this issue, a noise suppression method is proposed in this study, which integrates multivariate variational mode decomposition (MVMD) optimized by an improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO) algorithm with a hyperbolic tangent-modulated exponential decay wavelet thresholding technique. First, the IPSO algorithm is employed to automatically optimize the parameters of MVMD. Then, the dominant components of the verification signal are selected based on the energy entropy of each decomposed mode. Subsequently, a novel wavelet threshold function incorporating hyperbolic tangent modulation and exponential decay is constructed and combined with an improved thresholding strategy to denoise the residual noise in the dominant components. Finally, a verification platform based on a real-type transformer is established. Both simulated and measured signals are denoised and subjected to sensitivity verification using the proposed method. Comparative analysis with noise-affected verification results demonstrates that the proposed method effectively suppresses noise in the verification signals and improves the accuracy of the sensitivity verification.