Design and Development of Underwater Radioactive Material Cleaning Robot Applied in Pressure Vessel Volume 3 - Issue 3

Liming Zhang^1,2,3, Tian Tan¹*, Pengfei Liu¹, Wensheng Ma², Jingdong Luo¹, Yan Shen¹ and Qiao Li¹

• ¹School of Nuclear Energy Science and Engineering, Naval University of Engineering, China
• ²ChongQing Pump Industry Co, LTD, China
• ³Chongqing Machine Tool Co, LTD, China

Received: January 18, 2022   Published: February 01, 2022

Corresponding author: Tian Tan, School of Nuclear Energy Science and Engineering, Naval University of Engineering, Wuhan 430033, China

DOI: 10.32474/ARME.2022.03.000167

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Abstract

This paper designed and developed an underwater robot for radioactive material cleaning and other operations, instead of manual methods. Since radioactive substances exist in a pressure vessel, the interior of which is filled with water, and the working environment of the robot is underwater. Its working method is as follows: the inner wall of the pressure volume is cleaned by the cleaning and grinding tools mounted on both sides of the fuselage, and the radioactive material dropped from the bottom of the pressure vessel is cleaned by the robotic arm mounted on the bottom of robot. At the same time, sensors such as cameras, thermometers, and sonars mounted on the robot can return video images and information data inside the pressure vessel. Under the nuclear environment, the underwater robot can improve the cleaning efficiency of the inner wall of the pressure vessel, and reduce the radioactive radiation received by the staff, and control the production of secondary and tertiary wastes. The test results show the effectiveness and practicability of the underwater robot, meanwhile the robot can also be used for cleaning up other underwater radioactive environments.

Keywords: Underwater Robots; Radioactive Cleanup; Pressure Vessel Cleaning; Dynamic Simulation; Hardware Selection

Abstract| Introduction| Overall program design and research| Work module design scheme| Global balance calculation and dynamics simulation| Conclusions and Future Work| References|