As an important load-bearing component, steel wire ropes (WRs) are widely used in complex systems such as mine hoists, cranes, ropeways, elevators, oil rigs, and cable-stayed bridges. Non-destructive damage detection for WRs is an important way to assess damage states to guarantee WR’s reliability and safety. With intelligent sensors, signal processing, and pattern recognition technology developing rapidly, this field has made great progress. However, there is a lack of a systematic review on technologies or methods introduced and employed, as well as research summaries and prospects in recent years. In order to bridge this gap, and to promote the development of non-destructive detection technology for WRs, we present an overview of non-destructive damage detection research of WRs and discuss the core issues on this topic in this paper. First, the WRs’ damage type is introduced, and its causes are explained. Then, we summarize several main non-destructive detection methods for WRs, including electromagnetic detection method, optical detection method, ultrasonic guided wave detection method, and acoustic emission detection method. Finally, a prospect is put forward. Based on the review of papers, we provide insight about the future of the non-destructive damage detection methods for steel WRs to a certain extent.

Aiming at predicting what happens in reality inside mills, the contact parameters of iron ore particles for discrete element method (DEM) simulations should be determined accurately. To allow the irregular shape to be accurately determined, the sphere clump method was employed in modelling the particle shape. The inter-particle contact parameters were systematically altered whilst the contact parameters between the particle and wall were arbitrarily assumed, in order to purely assess its impact on the angle of repose for the mono-sized iron ore particles. Results show that varying the restitution coefficient over the range considered does not lead to any obvious difference in the angle of repose, but the angle of repose has strong sensitivity to the rolling/static friction coefficient. The impacts of the rolling/static friction coefficient on the angle of repose are interrelated, and increasing the inter-particle rolling/static friction coefficient can evidently increase the angle of repose. However, the impact of the static friction coefficient is more profound than that of the rolling friction coefficient. Finally, a predictive equation is established and a very close agreement between the predicted and simulated angle of repose is attained. This predictive equation can enormously shorten the inter-particle contact parameters calibration time that can help in the implementation of DEM simulations.

With the arrival of the big data era, it has become possible to apply deep learning to the health monitoring of mine production. In this paper, a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based method is proposed to monitor the health condition of the balancing tail ropes (BTRs) of the hoisting system, in which the feature of the BTR image is adaptively extracted using a CNN. This method can automatically detect various BTR faults in real-time, including disproportional spacing, twisted rope, broken strand and broken rope faults. Firstly, a CNN structure is proposed, and regularization technology is adopted to prevent overfitting. Then, a method of image dataset description and establishment that can cover the entire feature space of overhanging BTRs is put forward. Finally, the CNN and two traditional data mining algorithms, namely, k-nearest neighbor (KNN) and an artificial neural network with back propagation (ANN-BP), are adopted to train and test the established dataset, and the influence of hyperparameters on the network diagnostic accuracy is investigated experimentally. The experimental results showed that the CNN could effectively avoid complex steps such as manual feature extraction, that the learning rate and batch-size strongly affected the accuracy and training efficiency, and that the fault diagnosis accuracy of CNN was 100%, which was higher than that of KNN and ANN-BP. Therefore, the proposed CNN with high accuracy, real-time functioning and generalization performance is suitable for application in the health monitoring of hoisting system BTRs.

Acceleration sensors are frequently applied to collect vibration signals for bearing fault diagnosis. To fully use these vibration signals of multi-sensors, this paper proposes a new approach to fuse multi-sensor information for bearing fault diagnosis by using ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD), correlation coefficient analysis, and support vector machine (SVM). First, EEMD is applied to decompose the vibration signal into a set of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), and a correlation coefficient ratio factor (CCRF) is defined to select sensitive IMFs to reconstruct new vibration signals for further feature fusion analysis. Second, an original feature space is constructed from the reconstructed signal. Afterwards, weights are assigned by correlation coefficients among the vibration signals of the considered multi-sensors, and the so-called fused features are extracted by the obtained weights and original feature space. Finally, a trained SVM is employed as the classifier for bearing fault diagnosis. The diagnosis results of the original vibration signals, the first IMF, the proposed reconstruction signal, and the proposed method are 73.33%, 74.17%, 95.83% and 100%, respectively. Therefore, the experiments show that the proposed method has the highest diagnostic accuracy, and it can be regarded as a new way to improve diagnosis results for bearings.

Friction and wear behavior exists between hoisting ropes that are wound around the drums of a multi-layer winding hoist. It decreases the service life of ropes and threatens mine safety. In this research, a series of experiments were conducted using a self-made test rig to study the effects of the strand lay direction and crossing angle on the winding rope’s tribological behavior. Results show that the friction coefficient in the steady-state period shows a decreasing tendency with an increase of the crossing angle in both cross directions, but the variation range is different under different cross directions. Using thermal imaging, the high temperature regions always distribute along the strand lay direction in the gap between adjacent strands, as the cross direction is the same with the strand lay direction (right cross contact). Additionally, the temperature rise in the steady-state increases with the increase of the crossing angle in both cross directions. The differences of the wear scar morphology are obvious under different cross directions, especially for the large crossing angle tests. In the case of right cross, the variation range of wear mass loss is larger than that in left cross. The damage that forms on the wear surface is mainly ploughing, pits, plastic deformation, and fatigue fracture. The major wear mechanisms are adhesive wear, and abrasive and fatigue wear.