Nobuhiro Kadowaki

Snake-like robot negotiating three-dimensional pipelines

An in-pipe robot negotiating three dimensional pipelines including branches, elbows, vertical pipes, and diameter-changing pipes was developed. The robot consists of thirteen intelligent actuators, and applying the sinusoidal wave drive makes the robot form sinusoidal waves to obtain the propelling force by gripping pipe walls. In this paper, a newly developed micro servo controller mounted on each intelligent actuator and a newly developed rotational mechanism which controls the robot posture around the pipe axis are shown. These made the robot propel itself successfully in the three-dimensional pipelines and have the great adaptability to pipe diameter change from 40.0 to 205.0 [mm].

A new sliding micro valve generating/separating slug flow in micro chemical process

Recently, the study of the micro chemical process that uses slug flow has been activated. Slug flow which is a flow of two liquids to appear as striped patterns in a channel increases reaction speed and mixing efficiency in the fields of chemical technology. Conventionally, passive slug flow generation / separation technique has been used for those purposes. But due to the specific gravity of the liquid, the flow quantity and the viscosity of the fluid, passive slug flow process results in low control accuracy of the slug length.