AI-Based Predictive Maintenance Framework for Industrial Saw Blade Wear Monitoring Using Low-Cost Vibration Sensors

Transitioning predictive maintenance from expensive, high-frequency piezoelectric sensors to affordable, edge-deployed MEMS sensors poses a significant challenge in industrial tool condition monitoring (TCM). Both technologies differ in signal quality, frequency capability, robustness, and reliability, which would affect how accurately machine faults can be detected. This work presents a systematic framework to bridge this gap, enabling real-time tool wear prediction and cross-sensor transferability. The methodology employs unsupervised Wavelet Packet Decomposition (WPD) and dynamic programming on high-resolution vibration signals to establish ground-truth wear phases: initial, steady-state, and accelerated. Multi-resolution time-frequency features are extracted and globally ranked using a multi-metric scoring system. A multi-task Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) network is then trained to simultaneously predict a continuous wear index and classify discrete wear zones. To ensure model portability, Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) is utilised to align the high-fidelity piezoelectric feature space with the lower-frequency MEMS domain. The optimised multi-task Bi-LSTM architecture achieved up to 97.9% zone classification accuracy and a mean absolute error of 0.042 for wear index regression. Furthermore, CCA-based domain adaptation successfully transferred a model trained on piezoelectric data to classify unseen low-cost MEMS sensor data, maintaining a robust 87 % accuracy. Combining optimised WPD features with CCA effectively overcomes hardware and sampling rate discrepancies, proving the viability of using low-cost sensors for reliable industrial retrofitting and real-time degradation tracking.