Design and Analysis of a Wall-Climbing Robot for Large Generator Stator Surface Cleaning

Aiming at the problems of low efficiency and difficulties in cleaning of the surface and ventilation holes on the large generator stator wall, this paper proposes a wall-climbing cleaning robot which can operate on the unique stator wall surface and perform cleaning operations on the ventilation holes of the large generator's cylinder stator wall. The overall structure of the robot is composed of an adsorption moving chassis and an automatic cleaning platform. The adsorption moving chassis can adapt to the wall surfaces with different curvatures by integration of specially hinge structure and ferromagnetic adsorption wheels, and can provide stable adsorbing force on the stator wall where the ferromagnetic wall surface is interlaced with plaster cable covers. Automatic cleaning tool is consisted of cleaning brushes, distance adjusting structure, feeding unit structure, and vision system to identify and locate and clean the holes sequentially. Prototype robot cleaning system is constructed and the field test results show that robot can cross plastic covers on the wall successfully, and the designed cleaning tool can adapt differences between the ventilation stator holes.