International Journal of Mineral Processing, 39 ( 1993 ) 199-208 199

Elsevier Science Publishers B.V., Amsterdam

Monitoring jaw crushing parameters via vibration

signal measurement

Yigen Zeng, Min Zheng and Eric Forssberg

Division of Mineral Processing, Lule& Universityof Technology, S-951 87, Lulett, Sweden
(Received 18 September 1992; accepted after revision 4 March 1993 )

ABSTRACT

Fine crushing tests were performed on a laboratory scale jaw crusher with dry, monosize dolomite.
The source vibration signal was picked up by an accelerometer, the acceleration signal was amplified
by a vibrometer, and then stored on a DAT recorder during whole testing period. For each crushing
test, three vibration signal samples were taken and converted into an IBM PC accessible data format
using a digital oscilloscope. The digitised vibration signal was analysed with the aid of digital signal
processing technique. Through spectral inspection and principal component analysis, it was found
that two major frequency bands, 250-400 and 700-900 Hz, were strongly related with the variation
of the operating parameters. The first four principal components account for 91% of the total varia-
tion of the vibration signal. It was found that the inter-particle collisionand attrition without breakage
mainly affects the energy of the 250-400 Hz frequency band, and the variation of the frequency band
of 700-900 Hz characterises the breakage events of dolomite. With the aid of the multivariate data
analysis, the relationship was established between the power spectral density and the operating pa-
rameters such as the feed rate to the crusher, the close side crusher setting and the charge volume of
dolomite in the crusher chamber. The product size distribution described by Gaudin equation was
also related to the vibration signal. Thus, an alternative method for monitoring the operating state
can therefore be developed through measuring and processing the vibration signal from crushing.

INTRODUCTION

As an initial, energy and wear intensive comminution stage, crushing has

widely been used in quarry and mineral industry. Especially fine crushing is
expensive and difficult to control in practical operation; however, it plays an
important role in the subsequent stage of grinding. The jaw crusher is a basic
machine in the crusher family. The jaw crusher is widely used in both labo-
ratory and plant operations. Due to the similar working principles as a cone
crusher, it can be used to investigate some of the properties in fine crushing.
To optimise the fine crushing process, operating and response parameters have
to be measured frequently. With a traditional method to monitor these pa-
rameters, it is difficult to satisfy the requirement of immediate control and
adjustment in practice.
Mechanical crushing causes intensive mechanical vibration and acoustic

0301-7516/93/$06.00 1993 Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. All rights reserved.

200 Y, ZENG E~AL.

noise emission. A vibration signal of this kind can therefore easily be picked
up and recorded by simple instruments. Once a time-domain waveform of
the vibration signal was acquired, it could be processed with the aid of the
digital signal processing technique (Zeng and Forssberg, 1992 ). To establish
the relation between the crushing parameters and the vibration signal, the
vibration spectrum should be identified with the aid of the multivariate data
analysis method. The whole frequency span usually consists of hundreds of
frequency elements (independent variables); however, the number of obser-
vations is much lower than the number of frequency elements, and this makes
the further analysis difficulty. Since the peaks on the whole frequency span
are strongly correlated, principal component analysis can therefore be used
for data reduction (Wold et al., 1987 ); thereafter the multiple regression can
be applied to build the relation between the crushing parameters and the scores
of the principal components of the vibration signals - - it is usually called
principal component regression (Weisberg, 1985 ). Thus, the crushing param-
eters can be monitored and predicted by measuring and processing the vibra-
tion signal from crushing.

EXPERIMENTAL

Material, equipment and test procedure

The material was 15-25 mm mono-size dolomite, supplied by ErnstrSm

Mineral AB, Sweden. The calcium carbonate and magnesium carbonate ac-
count for about 95% of the total weight. The solid density of the dolomite was
2.85 t / m 3, and the moisture content was less than 1%.
A modified single-toggle jaw crusher (Retsch BB2/A) was employed for
the studies. The jaw plates consisted of manganese steel and were vertically
grooved and curved at the bottom. The grooves were about 8 mm deep at the
top and their depth decreased gradually to zero towards the bottom of the jaw
plates. The close side setting (CSS) could be varied from 1 to 20 mm by
moving the lower part of the fixed jaw plate (Fig. 1 ). The jaw stroke was 277
rpm and the minimum throw was about 2.2 mm. The vertical height of the
crusher chamber was about 350 ram.
The operating parameters were the feed rate to the crusher, the close side
crusher setting and the material charge volume (the filling height of dolomite
in the crusher chamber). Table 1 shows the variable operating parameters for
fine crushing. The mono-size dolomite was manually fed to the crusher cham-
ber to maintain constant charge volume during the whole test. The crushing
tests have been performed for 15-30 min, depending upon the crusher set-
ting. All the crushed product was collected during the stable testing period.
The particle size distribution analysis was performed by dry screening.
MONITORINGJAWCRUSHINGPARAMETERSVIAVIBRATIONSIGNALMEASUREMENT 201

1. Electric Motor 2. Jaw Crusher 3. VibrationSensor

4. Vibrometer 5. DAT recorder 6. A/D converter
7. Computer and analyticalsoftware

Fig. 1. Illustration of crushing system, vibration signal acquisition and processing.

TABLE 1

Variable operating parameters in fine crushing

RunNo. 1 (A) 2 (B) 3 (C) 4 (D) 5 (E) 6 (F) 7 (G) 8 (H)

CSS (mm) 3 3 3 3 6 6 6 6
Ca (ks/h) 64.96 64.97 64.62 66.15 96.9 101.7 96.4 103.3
V 1/3 2/5 I/3 2/3 1/3 3/5 1/3 3/4

Acquisition of source vibration signal

Figure 1 illustrates the crushing system and the vibration signal acquisition
and processing. An accelerometer of 1 cm in diameter was placed at the cen-
tral point of the crushing zone on the back side of the fixed jaw plate by a
magnetic attachment. The vibration signal was first transmitted to a vibro-
meter where two built-in filters, a 10 Hz highpass filter and a 1 ld-Iz lowpass
filter with attenuation rate in 18 dB/octavc, were used to minimise the DC
effect and the resonance caused by magnetic attachment respectively. The
amplified signal was continuously stored on a Digital Audio Tape Deck
(DAT) during the whole testing period. Since the sampling frequency of the
DAT unit was 48 kHz with 92 dB for the signal-to-noise ratio, the original
vibration signals were properly recorded.
To acquire the vibration data for an IBM compatible personal computer,
the recorded signal on the DAT unit was rcsampled with a digital osciUo-
scope. To avoid alias by non-interesting high frequencies, the sampling fie-
quency of the A/D converter must be set at least 2.5 times the highest fre-
quency of interest (Thomas, 1978). The primary studies show that the most
important information can be obtained in the frequency range below 1 kHz;
therefore a 4-cascade lowpass filter group (each with a cutoff in 24 dB/oc-
tave) at a cutoff frequency of 1200 Hz were employed before signal acquisi-
202 YZENGErAL.

tion. The sampling frequency of the oscilloscope was set to be 5000 Hz. Due
to the limitation of data holding memory, each batch of signal sample corre-
sponds to about 13 seconds. Since crushing was strictly controlled and main-
tained at a stable condition, three samples were taken from the original full
length recording to describe the whole variation of the vibration signal for
each crushing test; thus totally 24 vibration signals were used for vibration
analysis in this paper.

Procedure on vibration data analysis

After data acquisition, the time-domain waveform of the vibration signal

was transformed into frequency-domain spectra with Welch's method (Welch,
1967 ), which implemented with the fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm.
This is a computationally efficient technique for the power spectrum estima-
tion. In particular, this method involves sectioning the data into either over-
lapping or non-overlapping sections. Each section (2048 points for one FFT
section) is then modified by multiplying the data sequence with an appropri-
ate digital "window" function (Hanning window) before the periodograms
are computed. Finally, the modified periodograms are averaged and the re-
suiting spectral estimate is asymptotically unbiased and consistent. To com-
pensate the voids on the waveform caused by the windowing function, the
sections were overlapped with a fraction of 60% (DeFatta et al., 1988 ). The
unit on the vertical axis (the power spectral density) in the power spectrum
plot was V2/Hz - - the amplitude is a relative value, which depends on the
gain in recording, acquisition, etc.
The problem for identifying the spectrum was that the numbers of frequen-
cies was much higher than the number of practical observations. About 500
frequencies were found at the current resolution of the frequency axis. The
actual height in the power spectrum is meaningless since this depends on how
the peaks line up with the bins. The area below each peak, however, is quan-
titatively useful and represents the energy of the signals (Little and Shure,
1988). Therefore the whole spectral band was evenly divided into 50 sub-
bands. It was still impossible for the multiple regression analysis to fulfil this
task, even after averaging the energy in a certain frequency band. Since the
peaks on the spectra (independent variables ) are linearly related, the princi-
pal component analysis (PCA) was the best way of reducing the number of
independent variables (Wold et al., 1987 ). With principal component regres-
sion (PCR), the relation between the parameters and the vibration signal can
be established. The digital signal processing and the parameter identification
were performed by the DSP4ME (Digital Signal Processing for Minerals
Engineering) analytical toolbox based on MatLab programming environ-
ment (Anon., 1990).
MONITORING JAW CRUSHING PARAMETERS VIA VIBRATION SIGNAL MEASUREMENT 203

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

All the crushed products were collected during the stable testing period.
The product was then resampled using a rotary divider to obtain a represent-
ative sample for particle size analysis (Fig. 2). It is not appropriate to de-
scribe the whole particle size distribution with a single point. To simplify the
analysis, the sizing data were fitted by the Gates-Gaudin-Schuhmann equa-
tion with the least squares method. It is found that the major difference of the
sizing data is due to the crusher setting.
The aim of this paper is to find the relation between the pattern of the vi-
bration signal and crushing parameters such as the feed rate to the crusher,
the material charge volume in the crusher chamber, the close side crushing
setting and the size distribution of the crushed product. A time-domain wav-
eform was transformed into a frequency-domain spectrum via digital signal
processing. The vibration signal was characterised by the principal compo-
nent analysis, and the corresponding relation between variable parameters
and the latent variables for describing the vibration signal pattern was de-
rived with the principal component regression method (Weisberg, 1985 ).

POWER SPECTRAL DENSITY

Figure 3 shows a short period of the vibration waveform and the power
spectral density plot from the system without crushing dolomite. The simple
and significant waveform from the crushing system lies in a narrow frequency
band at 100-200 Hz. The signal was mainly caused by the eccentric bearing
of the flywheel. The small nipples at 250-400 and 700-900 Hz were mainly
caused by the movement between the moving jaw plate and the wall of the
crusher chamber.
Figures 4 and 5 illustrate the power spectral density plots of crushing do-

100
CSS for 1,2,3,4 : 3 mm ' y y
N
"~ 70 CSS for 5,6,7,8 = 6 mm
t-
-o
e~ 50
=

3O
..~
_~ 2o
=

=
10 1 lO
Particle size (mm)
Fig. 2. Panicle size distributions of all crushed products.
204 Y, ZENG ET AL

Amplitude vs. time index

0.10

0.08
-0.11 ,
0.06 0 0.1 0.2
(See)
0.04 Waveform section

0.02
.<

0 200 400 600 S00 1000 1200

Frequency (Hz)
Fig. 3. Vibration waveform and spectral plots of the crushing system.

,~ 0'06[(A) Ca=64"96 kg/h~Vc:U3 ~ r / f(C) Ca=6)~62 kg/h' Vc=l/3 1

oo4f
0.02
1 o 0.04
0.02

o. 0.02 fy to.,ot 0.05 f ,, ,

0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200
Frequency (Hz) Frequency (Hz)

Fig. 4. Power spectral density plots at 3 mm crusher setting.

0.15[ (E) Ca=96.9 kg/h, Vc=l/3 i /(G) Ca:96.4 kg/h, Vc=l/3.t - ]

oot
oo:i , ' \
004 f21Z 0.02 ,, ,~
o/~' / HT'"," , 7~
~ [ (F) Ca=l~.7 kg/h, Vc=3/5 [(H) Ca=l ~3kg/h; Vc=3/4 '
=o.o, t ~ JA~, oo~
o1061 ~
y~ ~1,

0 200 4oo 600 00o 1000 1200 0 20o 4oo 600 00o 1000 1200
Frequency (Hz) Frequency (Hz)

Fig. 5. Power spectral density plots at 6 mm crusher setting.

MONITORING JAW CRUSHING PARAMETERS VIA VIBRATION SIGNAL MEASUREMENT 205

0.07 CURVE: original

HISTOGRAM: equivalent

~ 0.05
r~

,~ 0.03

~0.01

0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200

Frequency (Hz)
Fig. 6. Original and equivalent power spectral density plots by crushing dolomite.

lomite under different operating conditions. The vibration spectra are much
more complicated than that in Fig. 3. The frequency contributed by the crush-
ing system is still located within 100-200 Hz. Due to the resistance by the
dolomite, the energy of this frequency band was slightly changed. Other fre-
quency bands such as 250-400 and 700-900 Hz were caused by breaking do-
lomite. The energy and pattern of these frequency bands were different when
the operating conditions varied. At 3 mm crusher setting, the higher the charge
volume in the crusher chamber, the sharper the frequency band within 250-
400 Hz. At 6 mm crusher setting, the significance of the frequency band of
250-400 Hz disappeared when the charge volume was 1/3 of the crusher
chamber. Therefore, the frequency band of 250-400 Hz characterised the in-
ter-particle collision and attrition without breaking dolomite, and the fre-
quency band 700-900 Hz was caused by crushing dolomite. When the crusher
setting was settled down, the crushing events were maintained in a certain
range. The inter-particle collision and attrition increased with the increase of
the charge volume of material in the crusher chamber.
Since the power spectral density in a particular peak depends on the reso-
lution of the frequency axis, it is not useful for signal characterisation. How-
ever, the area within a certain frequency band represents the vibration energy.
To interpret the "finger print" of the vibration signal, the whole frequency
span must therefore be divided into a number of narrow frequency bands.
Figure 6 shows an example of how the whole frequency span is divided into
evenly distributed sub-bands at the crusher setting of 3 mm and charge vol-
ume at 2/5. The curve is the original power spectrum and the histogram is
the equivalent area of the spectrum. The vertical axis of the histogram is the
average of the specific vibrating energy within each given frequency band.

Multivariate data analysis on vibration signal

A principal component analysis (PCA) is a basis for multivariate data

206 v, ZEN(;EI AL

analysis (Manly, 1986 ). With the principal component analysis, the data ma-
trix of the power spectra with frequency elements for columns and observa-
tions for rows were decomposed by two small matrices/" and P'. Plotting the
columns of/'shows a picture of the dominant "object patterns" the score and,
similarly plotting the rows o f f gives the complementary "variable patterns"
the weight of the component data matrix X.
Since the number of observations was lower than the number of frequency
variables and the peaks on the spectral plots were linearly correlated, the mul-
tiple regression can not be used directly to establish the relationship. The
principal component analysis was applied to reduce the source vibration fre-
quency bands into a few latent variables, which can describe most of the vari-
ation of the vibration signal. In final, the multiple regression can be used to
build relationships between the operating parameters and the latent variables
(scores on the corresponding principal components ).
Before performing the principal component analysis, the spectral data must
be centred, i.e., the specific energy of each individual frequency band has to
be subtracted by the average energy of this frequency band of all the obser-
vations. The critical weight of original frequency variables (the weight) was
set to 0.1, thus only 36 frequency bands were significant after performing the
principal component analysis. The significant variables can describe 99% of
all the original variables. It is found that the first principal component ac-
counts for 56.4% of the total variations of the vibration signals, and the first
four principal components can describe 91% of the total variations of the vi-
bration signals. The most significant frequency bands are 331 _+ 12 and
354_+ 12 Hz for the first principal component, 800-900 Hz for the second
component, 308 _+ 12 and 354 +_ 12 Hz for the third and 862 -+ 12 Hz for the
fourth principal component. Three samples for vibration signal were taken
from each crushing test, which was clearly grouped in the joint plot of first
and second components. The test with 3 m m crusher setting, 2/3 charge vol-
ume and 66 kg/h feed rate differs from the others. With the aid of the multi-
ple regression analysis, the relations between the score of the vibration signals
and the operating and response parameters can be established:
Ca = 82.4 + 275Sc2 + 686Sc4 +Scl ( 1648Sc2 - 7007Sc4) ( 1)
Vc = 0 . 4 5 6 - 2.86Scl + 1.34Sc2 + 4.90Sc4 - 89.27S~1Sc4 (2)
CSS = 4.5 + 10.65S~ + 27.63S~2 + 58.53Sc4 - 231Sc~ Sc3 (3)
SLP = 1.43 - 1.13Sc, - 2.07S~2 - 3.66S~4 - 16.9S~1 Sc3 (4)
ICP = 0.57 + 0.61Sc~ + 0.72S~2 + 1.19Sc4 t- 5.73S~ Sc3 (5)
where Ca is the feed rate to the crusher (kg/t), Vcthe material charge volume
in the crusher chamber, CSS the close side setting of the crusher (ram), SLP
and ICP are the slope and intercept of the GGS equation respectively for the
MONITORING JAW CRUSHING PARAMETERS VIA VIBRATION SIGNAL MEASUREMENT 207

crusher products. Sol, Sc2, Sc3 and S~4 are the scores on the first, second, third
and fourth principal components (account for 56.4, 28.9, 3.8 and 1.9 of the
variation of the vibration signal) respectively. Equations ( 1-5 ) account for
82, 76, 85, 88 and 90% of the variations of the observed parameters respec-
tively. The correlation of the model can be tested by the F-test, thus that:
~ N-q,-1 (5)
q,
where/~,.2 is correlation, N the total observations and q~ the variables in the
model, and i denotes 1-5. Substituting, N and q~ into Eqs. ( 1-5 ), Fi equals
21, 15, 27, 35 and 43 for Eqs. ( 1-5 ) respectively. The critical F value with 4
and 19 degrees of freedom is 5.26 at a significant level of 0.005. All the cor-
relations between the crushing parameters and the vibration signals are sig-
nificant. Therefore, by measuring the vibration signal and processing with the
DSP4ME toolbox, the scores of the specified observation can be derived from
the principal component axes with correspondent weight; thereafter, the
crushing parameters can be predicted when the operating conditions are
similar.
Since the vibration was contributed by many factors, each machine has its
own vibration "finger print": the variation of the vibration signal was strongly
dependent on the basic vibration pattern from the machine used. To evaluate
other crushers, some tests have to be done to obtain the "finger print" of the
system before a useful model can be established.

CONCLUSIONS

The influence of the operating parameters, such as the feed rate to the
crusher, the charge volume of dolomite in the crusher chamber and the close
side crusher setting on the vibration spectra, have been investigated under
laboratory scale jaw crushing conditions. The vibration signal was picked up
by an accelerometer and processed with the DSP4MP analytical toolbox im-
plemented with digital method. The spectrum identification was performed
with the multivariate data analysis method.
By inspecting the spectra, it was found that the most important frequency
ranges which characterise the variations of the vibration signal during crush-
ing were 250-400 and 700-900 Hz. The first frequency range is mainly caused
by the inter-particle collision and attrition without breaking dolomite, the
latter frequency band was due to breaking dolomite by the moving jaw.
With the aid of the multivariate data analysis method, it is found that the
first principal component accounts for 56.4%, and the first four principal
components can describe 91% of the total variation of the source vibration
signal. The frequency bands used for score estimation account for 3/5 of the
whole frequency span.
208 Y. Z E N G E T A L .

The vibration signal can be described by four latent variables (the first four
scores of the corresponding component ). The relationship between the vibra-
tion signal and the crushing parameters was established with the aid of prin-
cipal component regression. By testing the hypothesis with the F-test, all the
correlations between the crushing parameters and the vibration signals are
significant at a significant level of 0.005. Therefore, by measuring and pro-
cessing the vibration signal, the parameters used in crushing can be moni-
tored and predicted efficiently.

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