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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.

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