Selective Ensemble Modeling Parameters of Mill Load Based on Shell Vibration Signal

Jian Tang1,4, Li-Jie Zhao2,4, Jia Long3, Tian-you Chai4, and Wen Yu5
Unit 92941, PLA, Huludao, China College of Information Engineering, Shenyang Institute of Chemical Technology, Shenyang, China 3 Control Engineering of China, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China 4 Research Center of Automation, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China 5 Departamento de Control Automatico, CINVESTAV-IPN, Av.IPN 2508, Mxico {tjian001,jiajia0806-love}@126.com, zlj_lunlun@163.com, tychai@mail.neu.edu.cn, yuw@ctrl.cinvestav.mx
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Abstract. Load parameters inside the ball mill have direct relationships with the optimal operation of grinding process. This paper aims to develop a selective ensemble modeling approach to estimate these parameters. At first, the original vibration signal is decomposed into a number of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) using empirical mode decomposition (EMD) adaptively. Then, frequency spectra of these IMFs are obtained via fast Fourier transform (FFT), and a serial of kernel partial least squares (KPLS) sub-models are constructed based on these frequency spectra. At last, the ensemble models are obtained by integrating the branch and band (BB) algorithm and the information entropy-based weighting algorithm. Experimental results based on a laboratory scale ball mill indicate that the propose approach not only has better prediction accuracy, but also can interpret the vibration signal more deeply. Keywords: soft sensor, vibration frequency spectrum, empirical mode decomposition, selective ensemble modeling.

Introduction

The parameters of mill load (ML) inside the wet ball mill, such as mineral to ball volume ratio(MBVR), pulp density(PD), and charge volume ratio(CVR) have directly relationships with the grinding production rate (GPR) and the product quality of the grinding process [1]. Zeng et al constructed partial least square (PLS) and principle component regression (PCR) models between PD and characteristic frequency subbands based on the spectrum of the axis vibration and mill shell acoustical signals [2]. Shell vibration signal is more sensitive and less interference than the axis vibration and acoustic signals [3], which has been used to monitor the SAG mill [4]. Recently, a detailed experimental research was done on a laboratory scale ball mill, which shows that ML parameters have stronger relationships with the shell vibration frequency spectrum [5]. Based on the fact that shell vibration frequency spectrum can
J. Wang, G.G. Yen, and M.M. Polycarpou (Eds.): ISNN 2012, Part I, LNCS 7367, pp. 489497, 2012. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012

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be divided into low, medium, and high frequency bands evidently, a principal component analysis-support vector machines (PCA-SVM) approach was proposed [6]. However, principal components (PCs) dont take into account the correlations between the inputs and outputs [7]. Therefore, the vibration acceleration signal still cannot be decomposed and interpreted clearly. Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) was proposed by Huang [8], which has been widely used in the fault diagnosis [9]. Recently, bearing fault diagnosis method based on the EMD and the power spectral density (PSD) was proposed in [10]. More recently, an EMD, PSD, and PLS based approach was proposed to analyze the shell vibration signal [11]. However, the prediction performance is not satisfied. How to realize the nonlinear mapping and how to improve the modeling accuracy is still an open issue. Zhou proposed a GASEN (Genetic Algorithm based Selective Ensemble) approach, which validated that ensembling many of the available neural networks can obtain better performance than ensembling all networks [12]. The problem of the selective ensemble can be considered as an optimal problem, and the objective is to maximize the prediction performance of the final ensemble model. Branch and bound (BB) algorithm is a powerful combinatorial optimization tool, and it and its variants have been successfully used to select the optimal features [13]. Based on the concept of information entropy, a weighting method was proposed [14]. Therefore, a novel selective modeling approach for modeling ML parameters based on EMD, FFT, kernel PLS (KPLS), BB, and weighting algorithm is proposed in this paper. At first, the original shell vibration signal is decomposed into a number of IMFs. Then, PSD of each IMF is obtained based on FFT technology, and KPLS based sub-models of different IMFs are constructed. At last, with the combination of BB and weighting algorithm, the optimal sub-models are selected to ensemble as the final soft sensor model.

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2.1

Selective Ensemble Modeling Parameters of Mill Load

Strategy of Soft Sensor

The proposed soft sensor approach for ML parameters consists of data preprocessing module, sub-model module, and selective ensemble module, as shown in Fig. 1. The function of each module is shown as follows: (1) Data preprocessing module: Decompose the original vibration signal and calculate the frequency spectrum of each IMF using EMD and FFT technology; (2) Sub-model module: Construct ML parameters sub-models via KPLS algorithm; (3) Selective ensemble module: Obtain the final soft sensor models by integrating combinational optimization algorithm and weighting algorithm.

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Experimental design

yi
t x IMF1

yi 1i y
... Combinatorial optimization based on branch and band algorithm

Grinding process Empirical Mode Decomposition

FFT ...

xfIMF1
...

KPLS ...

Ball mill

x tIMFj

FFT

x fIMFj

KPLS

ji y

i y

t xV

Shell vibration

...
t x IMFJ

...

...

...

...

FFT

xfIMFJ

KPLS Sub-model

Ji y

Weighting algorithm based on information entropy

Data preprocessing

Selective ensemble

Fig. 1. Architecture of the selective ensemble modeling parameters of mill load

In Fig. 1, the superscirpt t and f represent the time and frequency domain signals

respectively; the subscript V represents the shell vibration signal; x tV is the original
t time domain signal; x IMFj and x fIMFj are the time and frequency domain signals of

the jth IMF respectively; j = 1,, J , J is the number of the IMFs used to construct ji is the output of ML parameters sub-model; y i sub-models of ML parameters; y

i are the real and estimate values of the final selective ensemble model; and y
i = 1,2,3 represents MBVR, PD, and CVR respectively.

2.2

Data Preprocessing Module

The vibration signals of many rotational machinery devices satisfy the condition of EMD decomposition. The shell vibration signal of the ball mill are stable and periodic over a given time interval. Therefore, the shell vibration signal x tV can be decomposed into J all IMFs plus a residue rJ all in this paper. These IMFs include different frequency bands from high to low. The residue can be either the mean trend or a constant. The following equation is gained:
t t xV = x IMF j + rJ all .
j =1 J all

Although the IMFs of the shell vibration are different, the interested information for ML parameters still cannot be extracted effectively. However, evident features can be found in the frequency spectrum of each IMF. Therefore, the classic Welch's method

Mill load parameters

...

(1)

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is used to obtain the PSD of the first several IMFs respectively. Here, the frequency spectrum of the jth -IMF is denoted as x fIMFj .

2.3

Sub-model Module

Modeling with the high dimensional frequency spectrum directly maybe lead to the hushes phenomenon and the curse of dimensionality problems. Using the latent variables of the input and output data to construct models, PLS algorithm realizes the dimension reduction and collinearity elimination simultaneously. However, it is a linear regression algorithm. Kernel PLS (KPLS) can solve this problem effectively [15]. Assume the number of the sample is k , frequency spectrum of the jth IMF is nonlinear mapped to a high dimension feature space, namely, the mapping is : (x fIMFj ) l ((x fIMFj )l ) ; then, linear PLS algorithm is performed in this feature space; at last, the nonlinear model of the original input space is obtained. To avoid the explicit nonlinear mapping, kernel trick K j = ((xfIMFj )l )T ((x fIMFj ) m ),
l , m = 1,2, k is used. The kernel matrix of the jth IMF spectrum is centralized as the following equation:

~ 1 1 T 1k1k ) , K j = (I 1k1T k )K j ( I k k

(2)

where, I is the unite matrix of k dimension; 1k is a vector with value 1 and length k . Based the nonlinear iterative partial least squares algorithm (NIPALS) and reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), the KPLS prediction output based on the training samples {(x fIMFj )l }lk=1 can be represented as: ~ ~ ij = j B ij = K j U ij (Tij T K j U ij ) 1 Tij T yi . y The kernel matrix of the testing sample K test , j is scaled with:
1 1 T ~ K test, j = (K test, j I 1kt1T 1k1k ) , k )K j (I k k (4)

(3)

where, K test , j is the kernel matrix of the testing samples; k t is the number of the testing sample; 1kt is a vector with value 1 and length k t . The KPLS prediction output based on the testing samples can be represented as: ~ ~ test,ij = test, j B ij = K test, j U ij (Tij T K ij U ij ) 1 Tij T yi , y (5)

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2.4

Selective Ensemble Module

When the sub-models weighting algorithm is determined, the selective ensemble modeling process is to select appreciate sub-models under the criterion of minimum prediction error of cross validation model. This can be considered as an optimal problem, denoted by the following equation:

max

J obj(max) = th s.t.

1 k l J sel ljsel i ) 2 ( yi w jseli y k l =1 jsel =1 = 1, 1 J sel J

jsel =1

wij

J sel

(6)

sel

il where, th is the thresh value, J sel is the number of the selected sub-models and y is the estimate value of the final model , which is calculated with:
il = y

jsel =1

wij

J sel

sel

lij , y
sel

(7)

where

j sel =1

wj

J sel

sel

= 1 , w jsel is the weighting coefficients of the jsel th sub-model. It is

calculated based on the information entropy of the prediction error of cross validation model [14]. To select the optimal ensemble sub-models under the above criterion, only the enumeration algorithm and branch and bound (BB) algorithm can be used. Aiming to the low computing efficient of the enumeration algorithm, BB algorithm improves the searching efficiency by the branch and bound process. It and its variants have been used to select the optimal features successfully. Before using BB algorithm, the number of the selected sub-models needs to be known at first. Therefore, the optimal selective ensemble models are obtained by running the BB and weighting algorithm ( J 1) times. This process can be described as: (1) Obtain the selective ensemble models with the number of the ensemble submodels 1, 2, , ( J 1) respectively; (2) Sort these ensemble models according to the prediction performance; (3) Select the ensemble model with the best prediction performance as the final selective ensemble model.

Application Study

The experiments were performed on a laboratory scale ball mill, and the experimental details are described in [5]. After the original vibration signals are decomposed with EMD, the following parameters were used to calculate the PSD of each IMF: data length 32768, section number 32, and overlap fraction length 512. The time/frequency domain curves of these IMFs are shown in Figure.2~3.

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Fig. 2. Curves of IMFs for shell vibration signal

Fig. 3. Frequency spectrum curves of IMFs for shell vibration signal

The first IMF of the shell vibration signal has the minimum time scale, whose bandwidth is 2,000~12,000Hz. Its amplitude is the minimum one. Comparing with the PSD with only ball load in [5], it shows that the first IMF maybe is caused by the impaction among balls. The 16th IMF is a periodic signal with the largest amplitude, which is the low frequency disturbance produced by ball mill system itself. The bandwidth of the 2th IMF is mainly between 2000~6000Hz, whose amplitudes are ten times of the 1th IMF one, which is caused by the impaction of the balls. Sub-models of ML parameters are carried out using 13 samples based the frequency spectrum of IMFs. The number of the latent variables of these sub-models is determined by the leave-one-out cross validation approach. Only the former 10 IMFs are used to construct the sub-models. The popular Gaussian kernel function is used. The prediction curves of the proposed approach (Weight sel ensemble), the best sub-model (Sub model best), and the fused all sub-models (Weight all ensemble) are shown in Fig.4~6. The statistical testing errors of the former 2 sub-models, the former 2 selective ensemble models, and the ensemble models are shown in Table 1.

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Fig. 4. Prediction results of the MBVR

Fig. 5. Prediction results of the PD

Fig. 6. Prediction results of the CVR

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Approach

ML parameters MBVR RMSE Sub_models RMSE Sub_models RMSE Sub_models RMSE Sub_models RMSE Sub_models RMSE Sub_models

PLSBased models

PD CVR MBVR

KPLSBased models

PD CVR

Fig. 4~ Fig. 6 and Table 1 show that with KPLS algorithm, we obtain the best prediction performance for MBVR, PD, and CVR with sub-models {2,8,1}, {4} and {3,2} respectively. Table 2 shows that the frequency range of IMF4 is 100~4000Hz. With the analysis in [5], this range contains the nature vibration mode of the mill shell and the material, ball and water load, and the impact mode of the ball to mill shell. However, with PLS algorithm, the best prediction performance is obtained via ensemble the 2th and 6th IMF. The selective ensemble models based on KPLS also have better accuracy than PLS based models. It is shown that the KPLS can construct effective nonlinear model between the frequency spectrum and ML parameters. However, with the limited modeling samples and anomalous condition of the experiments, more experiment should be done to validate this approach.

Conclusions

A selective ensemble modeling approach for modeling the load parameters inside the ball mill based on EMD, FFT, KPLS, BB, and weighting algorithm is proposed in this paper. This approach solves the problems such as how to adaptively decompose the original vibration signal, how to extract the features of different IMFs, how to construct the nonlinear sub-models with frequency spectrum, and how to selective ensemble the sub-models effectively. A case study shows that the proposed approach is effective to analyze the shell vibration and model the ML parameters. However, more experiments should be done on the laboratory and industry ball mill to validate this approach further.
The work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61020106003) and the National Science Foundation for Post-doctoral Scientists of china (No.20100471464).

Acknowledgments.

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