Structural health monitoring of belt conveyor based on distributed optical fiber acoustic sensor

Distributed optical fiber acoustic sensing (DAS) can serve as an excellent tool for real-time condition monitoring of a variety of industrial and civil infrastructures. This paper presents a belt conveyor roller fault abnormal monitoring method based on DAS, for the low accuracy and efficiency of the existing belt conveyor rollers fault detection. This method uses the Rayleigh Backscatter of coherent pulsed light to detect and reconstruct the fault signal, and proposes a method based on the combination of power spectrum features and peak detection to recognize and locate abnormal signals under intense background noise. The field test verifies the effectiveness of the real-time monitoring scheme of the industrial conveyor belt system, with a detection accuracy rate of over 87% for simulated fault signals, and a location accuracy of ±2.5 m. It provides a new passive distributed monitoring method for the all-weather structural health monitoring of the rollers in the industrial belt conveyor systems.