During operation, the acoustic signal of the drum shearer contains a wealth of information. The monitoring or diagnosis system based on acoustic signal has obvious advantages. However, the signal is challenging to extract and recognize. Therefore, this paper proposes an approach for acoustic signal processing of a shearer based on the parameter optimized variational mode decomposition (VMD) method and a clustering algorithm. First, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm searched for the best parameter combination of the VMD. According to the results, the approach determined the number of modes and penalty parameters for VMD. Then the improved VMD algorithm decomposed the acoustic signal. It selected the ideal component through the minimum envelope entropy. The PSO was designed to optimize the clustering analysis, and the minimum envelope entropy of the acoustic signal was regarded as the feature for classification. We then use a shearer simulation platform to collect the acoustic signal and use the approach proposed in this paper to process and classify the signal. The experimental results show that the approach proposed can effectively extract the features of the acoustic signal of the shearer. The recognition accuracy of the acoustic signal was high, which has practical application value.
Keywords: acoustic signal; cluster analysis; drum shearer; parameter optimization; particle swarm optimization; variational mode decomposition.