A novel mining conveyor belt modelling for UHF RFID sensor based health monitoring

Ultra High Frequency (UHF) radio frequency identification (RFID) sensor is recently proposed as a robust health monitoring technique of coal mining conveyor belts. However, the accuracy of the sensor response is impacted by the conveyor belt materials. This paper presents a novel analysis for conveyor belt modelling based on its dielectric parameters and circuit representation to identify its frequency response. The dielectric properties of the belt are obtained using a UHF RFID based passive resonator. The paper illustrates the propagation and response principles of the belt along with its modelling requirements. The analysis based on the proposed methodology shows that the belt model can be represented as a circuit of capacitance and resistance that has a response matched with the experimental response. Hence, the derived model can represent the conveyor belt electronically and used to obtain the belt medium's individual frequency response. Results show that the frequency responses acquired from both the theoretical model and an experimental analysis are close with a standard deviation of 0.0014. Therefore, this methodology of belt modelling caters to a robust health monitoring sensor performance in the conveyor belt environment by enabling the mitigation of belt's impact through prior calibration. The results demonstrate that the proposed model can reliably and efficiently represent the conveyor belt.