Mechanical Design and Simulation of a Water Pipes Cleaning Robot

Abstract

Pipelines have widely spread applications in the industry. Water, sewage, flammable liquid, high-pressure gasses, and oil are transported using pipelines. These pipelines are long, interconnected, and may be constructed underground or underwater. This makes their monitoring, periodic maintenance, and repair a hard job when done by human operators. Hence, a robot system capable of carrying out these complicated operations in pipelines is extremely requested. In this paper, a mechanical design and a prototype of an in-pipe robot system for cleaning 0.5 m inner diameter water pipes are presented. The proposed robot system is designed to perform cleaning operations for straight and curved horizontal water pipes based on the abrasion concept. The in-pipe robot system has three modules; forward and backward motion module, two identical cleaning modules that can move in rotational motion, and radial motion (in and out). These three modules are designed to have the robot's two main positions: an open position (for cleaning) and a closed position (while entering and getting out of the pipe). A 3D model has been built using SolidWorks software, then a finite element analysis was carried out on a robot's frame using two materials: Steel and Aluminum. However, the Steel material has been selected due to its high rigidity. The robot control system was done using Arduino software. Robot dynamics were simulated in a Simulink environment. The real-time robot testing showed that the proposed robot mechanism can complete the cleaning operations effectively. The developed robot is expected to minimize maintenance time, effort, and cost.

Design and Development of Robot for Industrial Pipe Cleaning and Inspection

“…The default state of the relay when the power is off for COM (Power) to be connected to NC (Normally Closed). This is the equivalent of setting the relay board IN pin to HIGH (has +5V sent to it)[10].…”