Abstract
The shipbuilding industry is very important for many countries. As an essential process in the shipbuilding industry, surface preparation (or coating removal) is gaining more and more attention. The traditional process used for ship hull coating removal is a sand-blasting process, which is harmful to the environment and inefficient. Recently, high pressure water jet technology has been developed to replace the traditional sand-blasting process. However, there are still many technical problems to be solved. In this paper, one wall-climbing robot was developed to remove coating based on high pressure water jet technology. Coating removal experiments under various experimental conditions were carried out and the corresponding coating removal rate for each case was obtained and compared. In addition, numerical simulation based on Fluid software was conducted to observe the water jet process more visually. Results show that the processing parameters, including the water pressure, travelling speed, inclined angle, and stand-off distance, can greatly influence the coating removal effect. The optimal processing parameters are obtained to guide the application of the high pressure water jet technology based on the designed wall-climbing robot for the shipbuilding industry.
Highlights
The shipbuilding industry is one of the supporting industries in many countries
In order to investigate the influence of processing parameters on the coating removal effect on the metal surface, high pressure water jet experiments were carried out coating
One permanent-magnetic wall-climbing robot process with afor coating removal device other was to remove the coating on the ship-hull surface
Summary
The shipbuilding industry is one of the supporting industries in many countries. The ship surface needs to be painted for protection. The most widely used traditional ship surface cleaning method is called sand-blasting [2], which generates a profile in micrometer-range by accelerating a sand-basting media through a nozzle with compressed air. Besides the sand-blasting method, there are other surface preparation methods, such as high temperature oxidation [4], electrochemical method [5] and laser coating removal method [6] The former two methods are not environmental friendly, and they both require large energy consumption, while the latter can induce thermal and physical damage to the work-piece due to excessive heat produced by the laser. Hybrid laser-water-jet technology was proposed to yield high material removal rate without thermal damage [7], the energy consumption was reduced but the costs of applying the two technologies are quite expensive.
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