Please join us on Friday, July 30 at noon to learn more about GE’s development and use of snake robots for on-wing inspection and repair processes. Please register to join the talk by Wednesday, July 28 5PM.
Zoom Meeting Registration Link (required): click here
Snake & Bio-Inspired Robots for In-Situ Gas Turbine Inspection
Industrial and defense assets such as gas turbines, ducts and vessels experience several modes of degradation during operation. Accordingly, periodic inspections are performed to assess the condition and conduct maintenance and repair. There are pervasive challenges to accessing the insides of these assets that even specialized inspection tools, such as borescopes, cannot overcome. This generally leads to the need for partial or complete disassembly and – in cases of mission- or safety-critical application – conservative maintenance/ replacement schedules that minimize the risk of missing a critical defect. Snake and continuum robots offer the technology to create soft robotic systems that can access these environments with robust, compliant structures that integrate sensors and actuators suitable for inspection and even repair of these assets. These technologies and processes would allow maintenance of critical civilian and military assets without the need for teardown and reassembly, leading to game-changing strategic and commercial advantages.
Speaker Biography:
Deepak Trivedi, Senior Engineer, GE Research
Education: B.S. (2004) Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, M.S. (2008) and Ph.D. (2010) in Mechanical Engineering, Pennsylvania State University.
Dr. Trivedi is leading the development of soft and hyper-redundant robotics technology for defense and industrial inspection and repair applications. Dr. Trivedi is also leading the development of dynamic sealing technologies for extreme environments spanning a range of applications including aircraft engines, power generating machinery and subsea blowout preventers (BOPs.). Dr. Trivedi has authored over 15 publications, 35 applied and 12 granted patents in the areas of soft robotics and mechanical component technologies.
If you have questions, or if you have suggestions for other topics that you’d like to hear about in this Lecture Series, please send an email to Eric Ruggiero (eric.ruggiero@ge.com).
July_30_Talk.pdf