Preliminary research on automatic inspection of secondary loop inside steam generators using micro robots

摘要

The inspection of pipes in steam generators of a pressurized water reactor (PWR) is two fold. One is to inspect the defects and deposits inside the pipes, which leads to many developments of micro robots in pipelines and other automatic apparatus. The other is to inspect corrosion and deposits on the connecting portions between the supporting plates and the outsides of pipes. This paper presents a preliminary research on the automatic robotic inspection of defects or deposit on the supporting plates. The scheme of the robotic inspection system proposed includes a wheeled mobile robot, a CCD camera mounted on the orbot, a monitoring/processing subsystem, and a computer control subsystem. Two kinds of micro mobile robots were designed and tested. One is driven by micro motors, and the other is driven by PZT elements based on the frictional/inertia principle.