Using vibration data to classify conditions in disk stack separators

<jats:p>Mounting sensors in disk stack separators is often a major challenge due to the operating conditions. However, a process cannot be optimally monitored without sensors. Virtual sensors can be a solution to calculate the sought parameters from measurable values. We measured the vibrations of disk stack separators and applied machine learning (ML) to detect whether the separator contains only water or whether particles are also present. We combined seven ML classification algorithms with three feature engineering strategies and evaluated our model successfully on vibration data of an experimental disk stack separator. Our experimental results demonstrate that random forest in combination with manual feature engineering using domain specific knowledge about suitable features outperforms all other models with an accuracy of 91.27 %.</jats:p>