POWER April 2016 - 38

OPERATIONS & MAINTENANCE
3. Four-wheeler. AREVA's newest nuclear plant inspection robot, RIANA, is a versatile system
capable of a variety of inspection tasks. Though shown here with wheeled drive, it can also
mount caterpillar tracks. Courtesy: AREVA
4. Tubular. Gecko Robotics has introduced
a robotic boiler tube inspection system that
can significantly reduce the time and expense
involved in ultrasonic tube inspections. The robot
climbs the tube wall without the need for
scaffolding and produces more precise and
accurate data than handheld scanners. Courtesy:
Gecko Robotics
botic inspection systems are the answer, and
options are growing rapidly here as well.
Nuclear power plants have long been a
growth area for robotics because of the number
of areas in a plant where it may be unsafe
for inspection personnel to go without cumbersome
protective gear, or that cannot be
manually inspected without time-consuming
preparations such as draining storage tanks.
One solution for the latter problem is the
Inspector robot by Newton Research Labs
and IHI Southwest Technologies, which can
conduct semi-autonomous nondestructive
examination (NDE) of storage tanks without
requiring them to be drained or taken out of
service, and at far less risk to plant staff than
using divers (see " Robotic Inspections of
Nuclear Power Plant Storage Tanks " in the
February 2015 issue).
Robots have been used for inspections of
the damaged reactors at Fukushima Daiichi in
Japan, where continuing high levels of radiation
(>5 Sv/hr) make direct inspections impossible.
In that case, the 510 Packbot by iRobot
(the same company that makes the Roomba
robotic vacuum cleaner) was used to conduct
assessments of damage to the reactors.
AREVA released its latest generation of
nuclear plant robots last year, what it calls
RIANA (Robot for Investigations and Assessments
of Nuclear Areas, Figure 3).
According to the company, RIANA is a motorized
platform with interchangeable measurement
or sampling modules that can be
adapted to the needs of the job. It's available
with four-wheel or caterpillar track drive and
is equipped with 3-D and thermal cameras
as well as on-board lidar to navigate around
obstacles and position itself precisely within
confined spaces. The first RIANA was delivered
to the French Atomic Energy Commission
last June.
38
Robotic inspection systems are becoming
more specialized and tailored for power plant
needs. One growth area is boiler tube inspections.
As anyone who has ever worked in a
thermal plant knows, tube inspections are a
difficult, dangerous, and unpleasant-but critical-element
of power plant O&M. Tube wall
failures are a common cause of forced outages,
which means accurately predicting and preventing
them is an excellent way of keeping revenue
up and unnecessary costs down.
Performing NDE of boiler tubes by hand is
slow and difficult enough to make it a major
undertaking that requires several days of work,
not just for the inspection itself but also for the
time to set up and take down the necessary
scaffolding. Robots are coming on the market,
however, that can conduct precise automatic
inspections in a fraction of the time, and without
requiring extensive support equipment.
Gecko Robotics has introduced a robotic
tube inspection system that can conduct ultrasonic
and visual testing of boiler tube walls
in less time than would be required without
robotic assistance (Figure 4). Jake Loosarian,
Gecko's CEO, spoke to POWER about it
in February. " Using the climbing robot, you
can get your results about seven times faster
than with previous methods. We can identify
any problems for the plant manager, and they
can then decide where they need to do repairs
instead of taking a lot of time to locate the
trouble spots. "
Because the system is automated, it's capable
of more precise and accurate inspection
results than handheld scanners. Measurements
are collected at different angles by an
array of eight ultrasonic sensors.
Climbing High
Climbing robots are among the options with
the most potential for plant use because of
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their ability to remove the need for staff to
ascend to potentially dangerous heights.
Ithaca, N.Y.-based International Climbing
Machines (ICM) has worked with EPRI to
adapt its climbing robots to conduct NDE
of very large concrete structures like dams
and nuclear plant containment buildings-
shown in the header photo (a video of the
project can be viewed at https://youtu.be/
ohcoGDn1rL0). Using lidar positioning,
highly accurate maps of the inspection data
can be created. The ICM climbing robot can
ascend a variety of surfaces and remains attached
through vacuum suction. ICM's robots
have also been used for inspections of
wind turbines (see the cover of this issue),
as well as for maintenance tasks such as
spraying coatings and sandblasting.
According to ICM President Sam Maggio,
the robot is capable of climbing any surface
on which it can maintain a vacuum seal, unlike
robots that rely on magnets and that can
only climb ferromagnetic materials. " It's the
vacuum chamber, which is surrounded by a
rolling, very flexible seal, that allows it to
go over very rough surfaces as well as surface
obstacles, " Maggio said. Because the
seal rolls over the surface rather than being
dragged, the robot will not damage the surfaces
it climbs.
Going Deep
Robots have been used for internal inspections
of large pipelines for years, but the
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POWER April 2016

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