Preliminary Exploration of Large Models Based on Self-Supervised Learning for Health Monitoring of Power Electronic Converters
Current artificial intelligence (AI) methods for power electronics converters make limited use of the abundant unlabeled data generated during real-world operation. This underexplored resource holds significant potential for advancing model performance. To address this gap, this paper presents PE-TSFM, a time-series foundation model tailored for power module health monitoring. The model adopts the PatchTST architecture combined with self-supervised learning and is trained on more than 143 million timestamps, where over 98\% of this training data is unlabeled and collected directly from an operating traction converter. In degradation classification tasks, PE-TSFM achieves an accuracy of 87\%, considerably surpassing five conventional time-series AI models whose performance ranges from 27\% to 45\%. These results demonstrate the model's strong few-shot learning capability and generalization across different operating conditions. This work promotes a shift from narrowly focused models in power electronics toward unified, scalable foundation models that can unlock value from large-scale unlabeled operational data.