Fault Analysis of Shearer-Cutting Units Driven by Integrated Importance Measure

Shearer-cutting units are important parts of coal production. However, they have high fault frequency, and their maintenance activities are costly and time-consuming. Coal enterprises urgently need an effective fault analysis method for shearer-cutting units. To solve this problem, an integrated importance measure (IIM) is introduced into the fault tree analysis method to identify the weakest links of shearer-cutting units. This paper develops an IIM-based fault tree analysis method to determine the key faults in shearer-cutting units. Taking MG400/930-WD shearer in Yuhua Coal Mine as an example, through IIM ranking, bearing wear can be identified as a key fault cause. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, the relative value distribution of four importance measures was analyzed by radial bar charts, and the accuracy of different rankings was evaluated by mean average precision. The results show that IIM can clearly distinguish the relative importance of bottom events, and the average accuracy of IIM ranking is 94.52%. Therefore, the proposed method can accurately and effectively identify key fault causes, and the limited resources should give priority to bottom events with higher IIM.