Surface Wear Assessment of Cleated Conveyor Belts with Machine Vision Approach—A Case Study

Surface wear of conveyor belts is a matter of significant concern in the mining and mineral industry as they play a crucial role in the transportation of materials and bulk solids over long distances. Traditional intrusive techniques for assessing surface wear in belts often result in production stoppages for their own maintenance. In contrast, non-intrusive techniques like machine vision offer an advantage by enabling remote detection of wear patterns. This article explores a machine-vision-based technique specifically designed for assessing surface wear on cleated conveyor belts across the belt width and belt thickness. The approach exploits the unique design of an open-V cleated belt to logically section a given belt image into five distinct regions across the belt symmetry namely, the left edge, left cleat arms, middle, right cleat arm, and right edge regions. Belt image sectioning facilitates a detailed analysis of wear patterns in each of the five regions. The analysis conducted at four different stages of belt operation revealed non-uniform wear patterns across the belt surface. For belt thickness wear, the left edge region wore 9.7% more compared to the right edge region, while the left cleat arms experienced significantly higher wear (18.7%) than the right cleat arms. The left cleat arms have the highest overall wear (59.4%), whereas the right belt region demonstrates the lowest thickness wear (17%). Regarding width wear, the left cleat arms experience the most significant wear (34.5%) among the different belt regions, whereas the middle belt region shows negligible width wear (0.01%). Over a 12-month period, the entire belt experiences 41.2% thickness wear and 0.8% width wear. To validate the accuracy of the wear estimation method, the obtained measurements are compared with actual measurements. The obtained errors are marginal with a mean absolute percentage error of 0.52% for belt thickness and 0.05% for belt width, establishing the efficacy of the presented approach.