In view of the problem that the partial discharge type of switchgear still needs to be judged by the staff according to the collected phase diagram and experience after the erection of ultrasonic sensor, this paper establishes four common partial discharge models in switchgear, analyzes the collected ultrasonic signals in time domain and frequency domain, extracts 8 characteristic parameters, and judges the fault according to the characteristic parameters by support vector machine, The results show that the recognition rate is high, which lays a foundation for the application of ultrasonic testing in automatic partial discharge diagnosis and fault recognition.