A Spectral-Based Blade Fault Detection in Shot Blast Machines with XGBoost and Feature Importance

Abstract

The optimal functionality and dependability of mechanical systems are important for the sustained productivity and operational reliability of industrial machinery, and have a direct impact on its longevity and profitability. Therefore, the failure of a mechanical system or any of its components would be detrimental to production continuity and availability. Consequently, this study proposes a robust diagnostic framework for analyzing the blade conditions of shot blast industrial machinery. The framework explores the spectral characteristics of the vibration signals generated by the industrial shot blast for discriminative feature excitement. Furthermore, a peak detection algorithm is introduced to identify and extract the unique features present in the peak magnitudes of each signal spectrum. A feature importance algorithm is then deployed as the feature selection tool, and these selected features are fed into ten machine learning classifiers (MLCs), with extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost (version 2.1.1)) as the core classifier. The results show that the XGBoost classifier achieved the best accuracy of 98.05%, with a cost-efficient computational cost of 0.83 s. Other global assessment metrics were also implemented in the study to further validate the model.