Research on passive adaptive wall-climbing cleaning and inspection robot of marine cylindrical steel structure based on conical magnetic adsorption wheel

The marine growth cleaning and structural defect detection of steel structures of offshore underwater facilities are essential parts of the inspection and maintenance of offshore platforms. However, a majority part of underwater structures of offshore facilities, such as offshore wind turbines, Jacket platforms, Jack-up platforms, etc., are cylindrical structures. Compared with the planar structures, cylindrical structures have large curvature, and less supporting area, and therefore put forward higher requirements for the performance of the attached surface working robot. This paper proposes a wall-climbing cleaning robot that can move freely on the wall of cylindrical steel structures and passively adapt to cylindrical structures with various curvatures and diameters. According to the structural characteristics of the robot, a static failure model is established to analyze the different instability forms of the robot and the minimum critical magnetic adsorption force is determined. To ensure the minimum mass and the maximum magnetic adsorption force of the conical magnetic adsorption wheelsets, the effects of air gap and cone angle on the performance of the conical magnetic adsorption wheelsets were analyzed parametrically, and the optimal structural size was obtained. Finally, the mobility and capability of the robot on the surface of the different diameter cylindrical structures has been validated through prototype experiments.