DC Series Arc Fault Detection in Electric Vehicle Charging Systems Using a Temporal Convolution and Sparse Transformer Network
Abstract
1. Introduction
2. Arc Fault Model of the Electric Vehicle Charging System
Simulation Analysis
3. Experimental Study of DC Arc Faults During Electric Vehicle Charging
3.1. Experimental Platform
3.2. Arc Fault Experiments in EV Charging Systems
3.3. Time–Frequency Analysis of Charging Circuit Current Signals
4. Arc Fault Detection Algorithm Based on Deep Neural Networks
4.1. Automated Sample Labeling
4.2. Network Architecture
4.2.1. TCN Channel
4.2.2. Sparse Transformer Channel
4.2.3. Feature Fusion and Classification
5. Experimental Results and Discussion
5.1. Algorithm Performance
5.2. Algorithm Deployment
6. Conclusions
- (1)
- Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed Arc_TCNsformer model achieves an accuracy of 97.34% and an F1-score of 97.35%, outperforming the standalone Transformer model (94.82% accuracy) by 2.52 percentage points and the TCN-only model (96.96% accuracy) by 0.38 percentage points. Compared with the fully connected Transformer attention mechanism, the sparse attention strategy significantly reduces computational complexity while maintaining high recognition performance.
- (2)
- Furthermore, after deployment on the Jetson Orin NX SUPER platform, the optimized TensorRT FP16 engine achieves an average inference time of 0.242 ms per sample and a throughput of approximately 4123.88 samples per second, while maintaining a deployment accuracy of 97.22%, demonstrating strong real-time capability and robustness for embedded edge applications.
Author Contributions
Funding
Institutional Review Board Statement
Informed Consent Statement
Data Availability Statement
Conflicts of Interest
References
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| Parameters | Symbol | Numerical Value |
|---|---|---|
| conductivity | 1 ×105 S | |
| arc voltage | u | Variable |
| Cassie arc characteristic voltage | 15 V | |
| Cassie time constant | 1.368 × 10−4 s | |
| arc current | i | Variable |
| arc column maintenance power | 10 W | |
| Mayr time constant | 0.225 × 10−3 s | |
| Constant of current | 1.5 A |
| Hyperparameters | Numerical Value |
|---|---|
| number of residual blocks | 4 |
| kernel sizes | 31 |
| tcn1 | k = 31, d = 1 |
| tcn2 | k = 31, d = 2 |
| tcn3 | k = 31, d = 4 |
| tcn4 | k = 31, d = 8 |
| Exp | Exp_Model | Params | VRAM (GB) | Complexity | Accuracy | Precision | Recall | F1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | {TCN//Sparse_Trans} + MLP (proposed model) | 383 K | 20–28 | O(h⦁L⦁w + L⦁d_model⦁dim_ff) + O(TCN) | 0.9734 | 0.9711 | 0.9760 | 0.9735 |
| 2 | TCN + Transformer + MLP | 350 K | 8–12 | O(h⦁ + L⦁d_model⦁dim_ff) + O(TCN) | 0.9714 | 0.9627 | 0.9810 | 0.9717 |
| 3 | TCN + MLP | 85 K | 4–6 | O(∑layers C_out⦁C_in⦁K⦁L_layer) | 0.9696 | 0.9638 | 0.9760 | 0.9698 |
| 4 | Transformer + MLP | 299 K | 16–24 | O(h⦁ + L⦁d_model⦁dim_ff) | 0.9482 | 0.9507 | 0.9456 | 0.9482 |
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© 2026 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.
Share and Cite
Yang, K.; Zhang, S.; Lin, R.; Tu, R.; Zhou, X.; Zhang, R. DC Series Arc Fault Detection in Electric Vehicle Charging Systems Using a Temporal Convolution and Sparse Transformer Network. Sensors 2026, 26, 1897. https://doi.org/10.3390/s26061897
Yang K, Zhang S, Lin R, Tu R, Zhou X, Zhang R. DC Series Arc Fault Detection in Electric Vehicle Charging Systems Using a Temporal Convolution and Sparse Transformer Network. Sensors. 2026; 26(6):1897. https://doi.org/10.3390/s26061897
Chicago/Turabian StyleYang, Kai, Shun Zhang, Rongyuan Lin, Ran Tu, Xuejin Zhou, and Rencheng Zhang. 2026. "DC Series Arc Fault Detection in Electric Vehicle Charging Systems Using a Temporal Convolution and Sparse Transformer Network" Sensors 26, no. 6: 1897. https://doi.org/10.3390/s26061897
APA StyleYang, K., Zhang, S., Lin, R., Tu, R., Zhou, X., & Zhang, R. (2026). DC Series Arc Fault Detection in Electric Vehicle Charging Systems Using a Temporal Convolution and Sparse Transformer Network. Sensors, 26(6), 1897. https://doi.org/10.3390/s26061897

