Design of cooling system for inspection manipulator and analysis based on experiment
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to present a different cooling method (water cooling) to protect all the mechanical/electrical components for Tokamak in-vessel inspection manipulator. The method is demonstrated effective through high temperature experiment, which provides an economical and robust approach for manipulators to work normally under high temperature.
Design/methodology/approach
The design of cooling system uses spiral copper tube structure, which is versatile for all types of key components of manipulator, including motors, encoders, drives and vision systems. Besides, temperature sensors are set at different positions of the manipulator to display temperature data to construct a close-loop feedback control system with cooling components.
Findings
The cooling system for the whole inspection manipulator working under high temperature is effective. Using insulation material such as rubber foam as component coating can significantly reduce the environmental heat transferred to cooling system.
Originality/value
Compared with nitrogen gas cooling applied in robotic protection design, although it is of less interest in prior research, water cooling method proves to be effective and economical through our high temperature experiment. This paper also presents an energetic analysis method to probe into the global process of water cooling and to evaluate the cooling system.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the China Domestic Research Project for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) under Grant 2012GB102001, and National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), No.51275286, and No.51175324.
Citation
Chen, T., Zhang, W.-j., Yuan, J.-j., Du, L. and Zhou, Z.-y. (2016), "Design of cooling system for inspection manipulator and analysis based on experiment", Industrial Robot, Vol. 43 No. 2, pp. 231-240. https://doi.org/10.1108/IR-07-2015-0136
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2016, Emerald Group Publishing Limited