Low-voltage AC series arc faults are a leading cause of electrical fires, posing significant risks to life and property. While artificial intelligence-based detection methods have achieved high accuracy, they often suffer from limited interpretability and are typically tailored to specific loads, thus struggling to adapt to the diverse and dynamic load conditions in residential environments. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel interpretable arc fault detection model based on prototype learning with a hybrid attention mechanism. Specifically, we design a Tri-Domain Dynamic Attention (TDDA) module that integrates time-domain, frequency-domain, and temporal derivative information, and embed it into a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for enhanced feature extraction. Visual prototypes are constructed from sample characteristics, forming a tri-domain arc fault prototype set. A dedicated non-arc prototype set is further introduced to refine the decision boundary and improve accuracy. The proposed model is validated through comprehensive experiments and hardware implementation on a dedicated test platform. Results demonstrate that our model achieves an accuracy of 99.65%, maintains over 99% accuracy across various single-load conditions, and exhibits high detection performance under complex multi-load scenarios.

As low-voltage distribution networks incorporate increasingly diverse loads, series arc faults exhibit weak characteristics that are easily masked by load currents, leading to high misjudgment rates in traditional detection methods. This paper proposes a series arc fault detection method based on an improved Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM) model. First, a test platform containing 12 household loads was built to collect arc data from both individual and composite loads. Composite loads refer to composite load conditions where multiple devices are running simultaneously and arcing occurs on some loads. To address the challenge of feature extraction, Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) is employed to isolate the fundamental frequency component. To enhance high-frequency arc characteristics, singular value decomposition (SVD) is then applied. A multidimensional statistical feature set—comprising peak-to-peak value, kurtosis, and other indicators—is constructed. Finally, the LightGBM algorithm is used to identify arc faults based on these features. To overcome the LightGBM model’s limited ability to focus on hard-to-classify samples, a dynamic weighted hybrid loss function is developed. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves 98.9% accuracy across 223,615 sample groups. When deployed on STM32H723VGT6 hardware, the average fault alarm time is 83.8 ms, meeting requirements.

Series arc faults are a major cause of electrical fires, posing significant risks to life and property. Their negative-resistance characteristics make fault features difficult to detect, and the existing methods often suffer from high false-alarm rates, poor adaptability, and reliance on high sampling rates and long sampling windows. To enhance the accuracy and efficiency of series AC arc fault detection, this paper proposes a rapid identification method based on singular spectrum statistical features and a differential evolution-optimized XGBoost classifier. The approach first constructs the singular spectrum of current waveforms via a Hankel matrix singular value decomposition and extracts nine statistical features. It then optimizes seven XGBoost hyperparameters using differential evolution to build an efficient classification model. The experiments on 18,240 current samples covering 16 load conditions (including eight arc fault types) show that the method achieves an average identification accuracy of 98.90% using only three nominal cycles (60 ms) of current waveform. Even with a training set ratio as low as 5%, it maintains 97.11% accuracy, outperforming Back-propagation Neural Network, Support Vector Machine, and Recurrent Neural Network methods by up to three percentage points. The method avoids the need for high sampling rates or complex time–frequency transformations, making it suitable for resource-constrained embedded platforms and offering a generalizable solution for series arc fault detection.