Research on Sintering Machine Axle Fault Detection Based on Wheel Swing Characteristics

During the sintering process in iron production, wheel swing is a sign of sintering machine trolley axle faults, which may lead to the wheel falling off and affect the production operation of the sintering machine system in serious cases. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a fault detection and localization method based on the You Only Look Once version 9 (YOLOv9) object detection algorithm and frame difference method for detecting sintering machine trolley wheel swing. The wheel images transmitted from the camera were sent to a trolley wheel and side panel number detection model that was trained on YOLOv9 for recognition. The wheel recognition boxes of the previous and subsequent frames were fused into the wheel region of interest. In the wheel region of interest, the difference operation was carried out. The result of the difference operation was compared with the preset threshold to determine whether the trolley wheel swings. When a wheel swing fault occurs, the image of the side plate at the time of the fault is collected, and the number on the side plate is identified so as to accurately locate the faulty trolley and to assist the field personnel in troubleshooting the fault. The experimental results show that this method can detect wheel swing faults in the industrial field, and the detection accuracy of wheel swing faults was 93.33%. The trolley side plate numbers’ average precision was 99.2% in fault localization. Utilizing the aforementioned method to construct a system for detecting wheel swing can provide technical support for fault detection of the trolley axle on the sintering machine.