Abstract: In order to improve the efficiency and reduce the failure rate,TRIZ theory was applied in the fault diagnosis of tobacco spreading equipment in tobacco redrying process. The spreading vehicle was identified as the bottleneck equipment causing system failure. By failure analysis,a contradiction matrix was obtained and a solution plan was put forward as follows: 1)changing the bearing installation;2)increasing the wall thickness of the carrier roller from 2.85 to 6 mm to extend its working life;3)improving control procedures to prolong the delay time of spreading vehicle for direction reversing. After improvement,the monthly average downtime and failure rate of spreading vehicle reduced from 6.27 to 0.66 hours and from 0.81% to 0.11%,respectively. The results indicated that TRIZ theory could effectively solve the engineering problems in fault diagnosis of tobacco spreading equipment.