Theoretical analysis and simulation of a new Halbach array——with applications to wall-climbing robots

Abstract

As a special kind of robot that can move on the vertical walls or ceilings, the wall-climbing robot is widely used in industrial fields, for example, in the nuclear industry and petrochemical industry, it is used for thickness inspection and weld detection of nuclear waste liquid tanks. In the construction and shipbuilding industry, it is used for spraying cleaning and flaw detection of large planes. At present, there are few applications of wall-climbing robots in cargo transport, which requires the robots to have high carrying capacity. The adsorption schemes of wall-climbing robots mainly include magnetic adsorption, negative pressure adsorption, electrostatic adsorption, bionic adsorption and so on. On the basis of the traditional permanent magnet array scheme——Halbach array, this paper proposes an improved version, which significantly improves the magnetic adsorption force and suppress the end leakage compared with the traditional way, so that the wall-climbing robot has a higher carrying capacity and reliability. By combining the specific working conditions of cargo transfer under a ship environment and the simulation analysis, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified.