Title: Analysis and improvement of non-contact permanent magnet adsorption unit for ship wall-climbing robot

Authors: Shuwei Zhu; Yufan Yang; Zhisheng Zhang; Yunde Shi; Zhijie Xia; Fang Jia

Addresses: School of Mechanical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China ' School of Mechanical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China ' School of Mechanical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China ' School of Mechanical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China ' School of Mechanical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China ' School of Mechanical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China

Abstract: In order to ensure the stable operation of the wall-climbing robot on the ship's complex curved wall surface, analysis and optimisation method of non-contact permanent magnet adsorption unit is discussed in this paper. The influence of magnet arrangement, coupling, air gap distance and other factors on the adsorption force is analysed by finite element simulation software, and the parameter magnet-to-mass ratio is introduced to quantitatively compare these schemes. In the two scenarios of planar wall and curvature-varying wall, the structural parameters of the Halbach array are optimised with the maximum magnetic-to-mass ratio as the optimisation objective, and the ratio of adsorption force variation is proposed as the reference of design to ensure the performance of the adsorption unit on the variable-curvature wall. The running stability of the wall-climbing robot with designed magnetic adsorption unit is verified by experiments on the wall with varying curvature.

Keywords: wall climbing robot; Halbach array; surfaces with varying curvature; ratio of adsorption force variation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBBR.2022.128682

International Journal of Biomechatronics and Biomedical Robotics, 2022 Vol.4 No.1, pp.45 - 51

Received: 30 Nov 2022
Accepted: 01 Dec 2022

Published online: 01 Feb 2023 *

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