Recently, China Shenhua’s Shendong Coal was granted a national invention patent for its Method and Device for Screening Faults in a Mechanical Arm, and the Mechanical Arm Itself. This technology employs a logic-based configuration intelligent fault diagnosis model to enable automated and rapid health assessment of the shearer ranging arm gearbox, effectively replacing the conventional expert-reliant manual diagnostic approach.
The ranging arm gearbox is a critical component of the shearer and is prone to relatively high failure rates. Traditional troubleshooting relies mainly on manual vibration measurement and expert judgment, entailing high maintenance costs, slow response, and limited applicability for bulk inspections and early fault prediction. The patented invention installs vibration sensors at key locations such as the ranging arm gears and bearings to collect multi-dimensional characteristic parameters, including meshing frequency, rotational frequency sidebands, and overall vibration levels. These data are then fed into a fault diagnosis model generated via logic-based configuration, automatically detecting various gear and bearing faults such as wear and damage. The system is complemented by a measurement-point tree management module, offline data upload functionality, a characteristic-value library, a diagnostic model repository, and a data visualization dashboard, allowing simultaneous processing of large volumes of measurement data, generation of equipment health reports, and real-time delivery of maintenance recommendations.
This patent transforms industry experts’ hands-on experience into standard, reusable diagnostic models, notably reducing both fault diagnosis costs and response turnaround times. It also supports historical data retrieval and fault early warning, offering a highly efficient technical pathway for intelligent maintenance of the shearer ranging arm.
