Just like any other industrial machinery, ships are taken out of service every four or five years to execute periodical maintenance. One of the major operations includes the elimination of rust and marine material accumulated to the hull. This also prepares the surface for later repainting. The operation is carried out by custom robotic solutions that offer greater efficiency, security, and optimum results.
Today, we will take a deeper look at it.
- Overview of the Process
The hull-cleaning operation ensures to conserve the integrity of the hull and thereby guarantees suitable sailing conditions. Maintaining the surface of the hull in a decent hydrodynamic condition further contributes to the reduction in fuel consumption and in turn, lessens atmospheric pollution.
One of the most popular techniques used for cleaning the ships’ hulls includes open-air blasting of the hull with metallic grits. This method achieves an optimal surface finishing, assures good paint adherence, and prolongs the period between this and the next painting session.
Now, despite the advantages of grit blasting technology, it is forbidden in several European countries since it’s not environment friendly. Here comes the relevance of robotization.
- Robotized System
Robotization has long been introduced to advance the operation procedure. But during the initial days, cleaning a closed cycle or enclosed hull area was a bit difficult with the robotic system. It further faced several obstacles including conducting cleaning operations in areas like rails, scaffolding, cranes, sheds, propellers, and cables.
Then, custom robotic solutions based on the robotic climbers existed for a certain period. But they all used high-pressure jetting technology that curbed their main function. Some of the major robotic systems introduced during this phase include the Hydro Crawler system of Dans Vandteknik, Ultrastrip system, Octopus system by Cybernetics, and HydroCat system developed by Flow International Corporation.
These sure showcased great efficiency but their major drawbacks included being expensive and using water jetting.
- Cost-Effective Solution – Modern Improvement
One of the major concerns of the new-age custom robotic company manufacturers is to develop efficient yet cost-effective robotic systems that can deliver optimum results. This family of robots has been developed with a spotting operation capability in mind. Spotting includes grit blasting small areas of the hull where any defect, often as small as a coin, has been found. Given the budget limitation is concerned, spotting is a common and effective form of hull maintenance.
Two types of robotic devices have been designed according to these criteria – robotic climber and robotic vertical tower. The robot climber comprises of a vehicle that can adhere magnetically to the hull and move at a speed of 0.2 m/s during grit blasting and 0.5 m/s without gritting. Its load capacity is 10 kg. It is usually used for reaching the parts that are otherwise inaccessible due to lack of space, obstacles, or the ship’s shape. The vertical tower has a loading capacity of 1000 kg and can move about 300m on the rails. It has enough loading capacity to incorporate a trusswork arm and carry out blasting in the shaped areas.
Conclusion
As you can note, custom robotic solutions have a wide application sphere than one can imagine. From entertainment to medicines, manufacturing industry to research lab, chemical factory to ship-hull cleaning – no domain is left unattended by robotics. And this is only to increase with the advancement of time and technology.
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2020