Research And Design Of An Inspection Robot For Small Diameter Polyethylene Gas Pipes

Pipeline is one of the most important components in the urban lifeline project.Polyethylene(PE)pipe has been widely used in the transportation of medium and low pressure gas in China's cities and towns due to its advantages of low price,light weight and corrosion resistance.National standard stipulates that PE pipe can only be laid in the ground.As it is located in a densely populated area,once a leakage explosion occurs,it will not only cause huge economic loss to the country,but also threaten the safety of life.Therefore,in order to eliminate the potential safety hazard of PE pipe,the daily monitoring of PE pipe is particularly important.Compared with the mature detection robot technology for steel pipe,the detection robot technology for small diameter gas PE pipe is still very lacking,so it has practical significance to study and design a kind of gas pipe detection robot for small diameter PE pipe.On the basis of the development and research status of pipe robot at home and abroad,and combined with the project of small diameter PE pipe detection requirements,a pipe robot for small diameter was designed in details from the respects of the scheme selection,mechanical system design,test and simulation of key parts,and robot dynamics simulation in this paper.After that,the robot was processed;finally,experiment verification was carried out.The main work is as follows:(1)According to the working condition of small diameter pipe,four types of wheel drive structure were designed in this paper.Then according to the characteristics of the four types of wheel drive structure,a straight drive structure was selected.Subsequently,an overall scheme design was carried out,and the main parts were designed and calculated in detail.Finally the PE pipe detection system in line with the actual situation,and the pipe robot control system were selected.(2)The working principle and driving performance of the robot drive structure,the motion interference of pipe robot in the case of turning were calculated theoretically.And the friction between the cup and the pipe,the force of each key component,and the transmission efficiency of each transmission component were calculated.Furthermore,the load capacity of the robot under normal pipeline environment and the minimum turning radius of the robot was analyzed and calculated.(3)SolidWorks software was used for 3D modeling,and the model was imported into ADAMS software for the dynamic simulation.Then the mechanism force and transmission efficiency were simulated in different attitude angles and movement speed conditions,and different pipe environments.Thus,the best design scheme was obtained to ensure the best accuracy and stability of the robot.(4)Three-dimensional printer was used to make a robot entity.Through the actual operation in a gas pipe,operation data of the robot can be got,and then the robot was debugged and modified.