Evaluating Conveyor Belt Health With Signal Processing Applied to Inertial Sensing

Conveyor belts are commonly used in the mining industry for efficient material transport. However, they are prone to failures such as idler anomalies, belt tears, and misalignment. Current monitoring systems only evaluate the conveyor or idle belt's condition at the installation point. This study proposes a method to detect faults in conveyor belts, specifically idler anomalies and belt deviation, using two IMUs installed at the lateral extremities of the belt to evaluate its health along its route. In a reduced-scale conveyor belt, we conducted experiments by collecting gyroscopes and accelerometer data in various scenarios, including normal conditions and anomaly situations. We modified the idlers' physical structure or changed the belt tracks to create these scenarios. We used similarity analysis techniques to compare the data collected and performed statistical hypothesis analysis to observe the influence of the anomaly scenarios on the gyroscope and accelerometer data. We used Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) for gyroscope data to compare ground truth with anomaly scenarios. For the acceleration data, we performed vibration analysis by converting the time domain data to the frequency using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and evaluating the difference in spectral density between the reference and anomaly data. Statistical hypothesis analysis revealed that anomaly scenar-ios influenced the gyroscope x-axis and z-axis more. According to the spectral density analysis of the accelerometer, it was revealed that belt misalignment on the y-axis may be detected.