Development of a wall-climbing robot for boiler tube inspection

Abstract

Various types of wall-climbing robots have been designed to fulfill the assignments in the spots which are either difficult to reach or hazardous for the human being. The boiler plays the vital role in electrical power plants, which consists of a number of tubes of 63.4 mm in diameter and of 30 m in length. The tubes are faced with defects such as externally reduction of wall thickness due to abrasion or corrosion as well as the internal cracks due to erosion. Any problem or failure may affect the efficiency or shut down the entire plants. Thus, the early diagnose or fault detection is essential to prevent the inefficiency and the outage of the power plants. A tracked, magnetic wall-climbing robot is designed to perform an inspection of the defect over the boiler tubes in fossil power plants semi-automatically. During the inspection, a camera is carried by the magnetic wall-climbing robot to take high-resolution photos of the tubes. A magnet bar is fixed under the robot which provides the suction force. In this report, the development of the wall-climbing robot is shown, and the remote inspection technique is discussed in details.