Research on the Wall-Climbing Robot of TOFD Inspection for Welding Seam of Spherical Tank

Abstract

Spherical tank is a kind of steel pressure vessel, widely used in petroleum, liquefied natural gas and other material storage, its body is composed of a plurality of spherical shell plate after welding, and the welding quality of the spherical shell plate will directly affect the service life of the entire spherical tank. With the continuous development of automation technology, and the continuous improvement of the labor intensity and safety requirements for testing personnel, farewell to the detection mode of scaffolding has always been necessary, while greatly improving the working environment of operators, improve the work efficiency, developed a set of ball tank weld TOFD detection wall-climbing robot system. The magnetic wheel adsorption method is adopted to ensure that the robot crawls stably on the vertical wall of the spherical tank. A flexible probe compression mechanism is designed and an ultrasonic TOFD probe is used as a scanning device to achieve good coupling. Complete the design and implementation of the control scheme to achieve accurate and stable control of the robot and realize automatic scanning.