Physics-Enhanced Orthogonal Sensing for Self-Supervised Anomaly Detection in Rolling Mills

The rolling mill guiding system is a key component that affects the quality of steel products. However, due to the harsh on-site environment, there is usually a lack of effective online monitoring and early warning mechanisms. Moreover, in industrial environments, fault samples are very scarce, making supervised artificial intelligence methods difficult to apply. This paper proposes a “physics-enhanced” orthogonal-sensing cyber-physical architecture that integrates hardware and software design. At the hardware level, an embedded orthogonal sensing layout (P⊥V) is designed to decouple drive-chain vibration from rolling-force fluctuations at the transducer level. At the algorithm level, the state monitoring of the guiding system is formulated as a self-supervised anomaly detection problem, and a two-branch network architecture is designed: one branch uses the CSD transformer to capture physical coupling characteristics, while the other branch uses VQ-VAE to extract operating-condition context. Experimental results on a dataset comprising real operational data and expert-validated synthetic fault scenarios show that the system achieves an AUC-ROC of 0.952 and a false alarm rate of 0.048 under a 95% TPR, with an end-to-end processing latency of approximately 8 ms per window and a system-level fault response time of approximately 108 ms, and thus meets the requirements of real-time industrial monitoring.