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.

Guide rails are amongst the most important components of mine hoist systems, and faults in them must be detected as early as possible to avoid fatal breakdowns in mine production. Presently, guide rail inspection is performed visually in most situations. In this paper, we examine a more efficient approach based on multi-time scale and dynamic time warping (DTW) to diagnose guide rail faults including embossment, bumps, and clearance. Firstly, vibration signals collected from operational conveyance under different fault categories are analyzed and the corresponding characteristic waveforms (CWs) are extracted. Embossment faults are identified with priority according to visible disparities in CW patterns on a large time scale. Then, templates for bump and clearance faults are established through processing the CWs on a small time scale. Subsequently, the distances of DTW (DDTWs) between test samples and the selected templates are calculated. Finally, the remaining fault conditions are classified according to the DDTW results since the same fault category has the smallest distance. Experiments are conducted on a guide rail fault simulator to demonstrate the reliability of the proposed method. The resultant diagnosis accuracies are 100%, 90.40%, and 84.53%, respectively, for embossment, bump, and clearance faults, which indicates that the proposed approach is feasible and effective for diagnosing guide rail faults under variable operating conditions and different fault severities.

Accurately predicting the remaining useful life (RUL) of bearing by analyzing vibration signals is challenging and meaningful. To address this issue, a novel method based on spectrum image similarity is proposed in this paper. First, spectrum images for the whole lifecycle data of reference bearings are obtained by performing fast Fourier transformation (FFT). Second, the similarity is calculated between the current monitored data of operating bearing and run-to-failure images of reference bearings. Then, the weights of reference bearings are derived based on the similarity measures. Finally, the RUL of the operating bearing is estimated with the weighted average of the RULs of referenced bearings. The proposed method is demonstrated based on 2012 PHM Data Challenge Competition data, which shows its effectiveness and practicality.

In vertical mine hoisting systems, the rigid guide serves as a critical safety component whose failure may induce severe dynamic disturbances and potentially trigger cascading safety incidents. Existing data-driven diagnosis methods for rigid guides often lack robustness under variable operating conditions and require substantial labeled data. Yet in practical mine hoisting operations, variations in hoisting speed and lifting mass are inevitable, and acquiring sufficient fault samples is challenging due to safety constraints. To address these problems, this paper proposes a novel fault diagnosis framework that integrates a physics-informed feature-extraction pipeline with the zero-space observer theory. Vibration signals are processed to extract dimensionless and relative features, which are deliberately designed based on the dynamic mechanisms underlying different fault states. These features rely solely on the geometric characteristics of the waveform at the fault location, rendering them sensitive to fault types while remaining robust to variations in operating conditions. The feature set is subsequently optimized using the minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR) algorithm to enhance computational efficiency, mitigate overfitting, and improve the generalization ability of the method. A set of zero-space observers is then constructed to perform efficient fault classification through geometric operations in the feature space, with each observer specifically sensitive to its corresponding health state while remaining insensitive to others. Experimental validation across multiple health states and operational variations demonstrates that the proposed method outperforms four widely used intelligent models in both classification accuracy and computational efficiency, showing strong suitability for real-world deployment in coal mining applications.