Feature extraction and selection based on vibration spectrum with application to estimating the load parameters of ball mill in grinding process

Feature extraction and selection are important issues in soft sensing and complex nonlinear system modeling. In this paper, a new feature extraction and selection approach based on the vibration frequency spectrum is proposed to estimate the load parameters of wet ball mill in grinding process. This approach can simplify the modeling process. In this study, the vibration acceleration signals are first transformed into the frequency spectrum by fast Fourier transform (FFT). Then the candidate features are extracted and selected from the frequency spectrum, which include characteristic frequency sub-bands, spectral principal components, and features of local peaks. Mutual information, spectral segment clustering and kernel principal component analysis are used to obtain these candidate features. Finally, a combinatorial optimization method based on adaptive genetic algorithm selects the input sub-set and parameters of the soft sensor model simultaneously. This approach is successfully applied in a laboratory scale wet ball mill. The test results show that the proposed approach is effective for modeling the parameters of mill load. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.