Water hydraulic manipulator for fail safe and fault tolerant remote handling operations at ITER

Development and design optimization of water hydraulic manipulator for ITER

“…The TEKES WHMAN is a teleoperated water hydraulic manipulator arm with force feedback of six degrees of freedom [4]. The arm is equipped with seven direct driven joint actuators providing six degrees of freedom for Cartesian task space operation.…”

“…This is a common approach widely used in aviation industry for the safetycritical functions such as landing gear and steer-by-wire functions. In addition, these studies related to safety and fault tolerance of WHMAN and movers are underway at TUT/IHA [4].…”

“…Examples of these are Cassette Multifunctional Mover (CMM), its Second Cassette End Effector (SCEE) and TEKES water hydraulic manipulator (WHMAN) that will be located on the top of the CMM [2][3][4]. WHMAN's mechanical and control systems are designed and developed at TUT/IHA.…”

“…WHMAN's mechanical and control systems are designed and developed at TUT/IHA. WHMAN manufacturing, testing and assembly also are taking place mostly at TUT/IHA [4]. WHMAN is designed from the beginning to be used with water to fulfil ITER remote handling and cleanliness requirements.…”

“…The design and development are done mainly with the aid of threedimensional geometric analyses on manipulator reach and space constraints by using three-dimensional models and virtual reality modelling in CAD environment. In addition, dynamic simulation models of hydraulic manipulators have been developed to enable virtual prototyping and hardware-in-the-loop simulation studies for various digital prototypes with different design parameters and control algorithms [4,5]. After geometrical constraints were fulfilled, the manipulator actuators are sized according to certain specification to be able to carry the specified payload with certain acceleration and torque reserve capacity.…”