Bucket teeth are the key vulnerable parts of mining excavators. Their working objects are generally ore, rock or soil. The working conditions are very bad. The service life of bucket teeth is often less than 4 weeks. In addition, with the expansion of open-pit mining scale and the demand for mineral resources, the consumption of bucket teeth is very huge. According to statistics, there are 2000 ~ 2500 large mining excavators with more than 2m3 in service in China, and the direct economic loss of bucket teeth is about 30 million yuan / year.
Once the bucket teeth have problems (such as bucket teeth breaking, bucket teeth falling off, etc.), it will bring a series of problems. First of all, the failure of bucket teeth will increase the friction resistance during the mining operation of electric shovel, resulting in the difficulty of bucket mining, affecting the efficiency of mining operation and accelerating the consumption of bucket; Secondly, the bucket teeth are mostly made of high manganese steel or alloy steel, and their hardness is much higher than that of ore and other materials. If the bucket teeth enter the crusher together with ore materials, the crusher will be shut down and damaged, thus damaging the whole mining crushing production line. The maintenance of the whole production line is difficult, time-consuming and expensive. In addition, the shutdown of the production line will cause huge economic losses. In addition, the falling bucket teeth cannot be broken, which will make the crusher unable to work, resulting in serious mechanical accidents; Secondly, it is time-consuming and laborious to remove the bucket teeth of the crusher. First, remove the materials of the crusher, and then heat and cut off the bucket teeth. Due to thermal expansion, the bucket teeth are easy to pop out of the crusher at a very fast speed, which is a very dangerous thing, and even endanger the personal safety of on-site operators and maintenance personnel.
Based on the consideration of the above contents, the bucket tooth detection of the electric shovel bucket is very important. Monitoring the bucket teeth on the bucket, finding faults in time and giving an alarm can not only effectively protect the service life of the bucket and other equipment and prevent huge economic losses, but also ensure the personal safety of on-site staff. As the open-pit mining excavators are generally large excavators with huge size and poor working conditions, it is not convenient for operators to check the status of bucket teeth manually; And the shovel bucket is the main working mechanism of mining operation, which is in contact with mineral materials. The traditional contact monitoring method can not meet the actual work requirements. At present, the shovel operation generally adopts the system of four shifts and three shifts, that is, the shovel needs to work continuously for 24 hours. Therefore, the inspection of the bucket can only be carried out during the shift handover. When the bucket teeth fall off, it can not provide timely early warning information.
Based on the above analysis, it is necessary to use the non-contact bucket tooth detection system combined with vision technology. Install the appropriate machine vision system at the appropriate position of the shovel, and design the detection algorithm that can judge whether the bucket tooth of the shovel fails, so as to provide early warning information in time, guide the on-site personnel to deal with it, reduce the maintenance time, cost and economic loss, and ensure the personal safety of workers, This has important practical significance and economic value for ore mining and loading production.