Lifting load monitoring of mine hoist through vibration signal analysis with variational mode decomposition

Mine hoists play a crucial role in vertical-shaft transportation, and one of the main causes of their faults is abnormal lifting load. However, direct measurement of the load value is difficult. Further, the original structure must be destroyed for sensor installation. To facilitate efficient and accurate monitoring of the lifting load of mine hoist, this paper presents a novel condition-monitoring method based on variational mode decomposition (VMD) and support vector machine (SVM) through vibration signal analysis. First, traditional empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is used to analyze the vibration signal collected by an acceleration sensor, and the number of obtained intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) is employed to set the VMD mode number. Second, the obtained vibration signal is processed by the parameterized VMD, and the useful IMFs of VMD are selected through correlation analysis for feature extraction. Third, the obtained features are used to train an SVM model, and the trained SVM is used to monitor the mine-hoist lifting load. In this study, experiments on an operated mine hoist are also conducted to verify the reliability and validity of the proposed method. The experimental results show that the proposed method can accurately identify the considered lifting load conditions.