【Haichuan Chemical Salary News】Robots developed by Zhejiang University now in use in Zhoushan – capable of removing rust from large ships as well as cleaning petrochemical tanks
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Oceangoing ships need to have the rust, old paint, and marine organisms attached to their hulls removed regularly to ensure they remain in good working condition. Traditional manual removal is a typical labor-intensive task, and it comes with several insurmountable drawbacks, such as the difficulty of working at heights which increases the risk of injury, the environmental pollution and health hazards associated with sandblasting, as well as rising labor costs and difficulties in finding workers. The rust-removing wall-climbing robot developed by Professor Zhu Shiqiang’s team at Zhejiang University can effectively address these challenges. Recently, the first robot was put into use at Jinhai Shipping Company in Zhoushan City. This rust-removing wall-crawling robot weighs 72 kilograms and has a loading capacity of over 100 kilograms. It uses ultra-high-pressure water jets with a pressure of more than 200 megapascals to remove rust and paint, and it can simultaneously draw wastewater from the ship’s deck surface to collection equipment, thereby preventing wastewater containing rust and old paint from flowing directly into the sea and causing pollution.
Song Wei, a key technical member of the team and a teacher at the School of Oceanography at Zhejiang University, explained that while meeting the requirements of the SA2.5 rust removal standard, this robot can achieve a maximum working efficiency of 81 square meters per hour, with an average working efficiency of 40 square meters per hour. This rust-removing wall-climbing robot was developed and put into practical use by Zhu Shiqiang’s team, building on more than 10 years of research in special robots and hydrodynamic technologies, through two years of testing with four different model versions as well as trials on actual ships. The team has successively broken through key technologies such as the design of single-sided highly adsorptive permanent magnet components, the lightweight design of heavy-load wall-climbing robots, the optimization of the spatial distribution of ultra-high pressure water jet nozzles, and surface-adaptive vacuum wastewater recovery.
Song Wei explained that the first challenge for this robot is to resolve the conflict between weight and magnetism, by designing a magnet that is light in weight yet has strong adsorption power. “We resolved the magnet issue through optimized design of the magnetic circuit and magnet component sizes. ”Song Wei said, “The design of the mechanical structure also helps to reduce the overall weight of the robot, making it easier to handle manually.” ” The adsorption principle of wall-climbing robots on the ship’s surface is relatively simple, but practical applications have to deal with highly complex situations. Different ship types, welding and painting processes, as well as the degree of erosion of paint by seawater, all affect the performance of wall-climbing robots. Zhu Shiqiang’s team encountered a Vietnamese bulk carrier whose welds were placed at a very high position, which could easily cause getting stuck. “These protrusions and surfaces can affect the vacuum sealing performance, thereby reducing the ability to recover vacuum. Therefore, it is necessary to design a sealing device in the vacuum recovery area that can accommodate both protrusions and curved surfaces, thereby ensuring effective vacuum recovery. ”Song Wei said.
Zhoushan is an important shipbuilding and petrochemical storage and transportation base in China. In addition to ships, this robot can also be used for the wall maintenance of petrochemical storage tanks. Currently, Zhoushan has nearly 30 million cubic meters of petrochemical storage tanks; once the relevant crude oil storage facilities are completed, the capacity of these tanks will reach hundreds of millions of cubic meters. This is of great value for Zhejiang University’s rust-removing wall-climbing robot; it can effectively support the local industries in Zhoushan, and it will also gain more experience through practical use, enabling rapid improvement and development. Song Wei explained that models with greater load capacity and higher operational efficiency are currently in the prototype assembly phase, while the amphibious models will have their prototypes developed by the end of this year. Leveraging Zhejiang University’s multidisciplinary strengths, future rust-removal and wall-climbing robots will incorporate more artificial intelligence technologies. By integrating data from multiple sensors, they will be able to assess the effectiveness of cleaning, plan their own paths, optimize system parameters, and thus achieve maximum efficiency in their operations.
“The operation of a wall-climbing robot is similar to painting; the less overlap there is between adjacent cleaning traces, the higher the efficiency of the operation. At the same time, different paint grades and coating processes require that system parameters such as crawling speed, water pressure, and nozzle rotation speed be automatically adjusted and optimized based on the actual cleaning results, which is also essential for improving operational efficiency. We hope to fully leverage the potential of robots through the application of artificial intelligence technology, in order to further improve average efficiency. ”Song Wei said. To date, the team has filed nearly 20 related patents and received financial support from local authorities and investment firms; it is now set to pursue the transformation of its knowledge achievements into commercial products.
This rust-removing wall-climbing robot technology is worth promoting and could serve as standard equipment for the Liaoning.
New technologies can only demonstrate their value when they are put into use on a wider scale. Many storage tanks need to be cleaned every year, and this is really great. But it has to be tried to find out; at first, its functionality may not be suitable for all storage tanks, such as those made of different materials
Definitely. It’s not easy at the beginning, but that is the foundation for things to become easier later on
This is not a big problem for ships