Design and testing of equipment for non-destructive rehabilitation of bridge deck delaminations.

摘要

Robots can perform accurate, fast, cheap and reliable repair and maintenance for the country's aging and deteriorating bridge decks. This thesis aims at developing a small, robust and reliable drilling and material delivery unit to perform the Non-Destructive Rehabilitation (NDR) for the Automated Non-Destructive Evaluation and Rehabilitation System (ANDERS). The ANDERS NDR uses a Seekur robot as a platform for the system and a Schunk robotic arm for the manipulation and precision. A modified Bosch rotary hammer drill was used to perform minimal invasive drilling to reach the defects through which alumino silicate matrix was pumped to repair and bond the delamination. The scope of this thesis covers the design, machining and testing of the complete robotic drilling and material delivery system. This system was thoroughly tested for more than 300 cycles indoors and outdoors and even on deteriorated bridge decks.;Testing of the drilling system showed that the current drill bit could not be used for rehabilitation of delaminations smaller than 0.125 inches as the concrete dust clogged the openings. Hence the second part of this thesis focuses on developing a new suction drill bit for drilling clean holes in delaminations. A 0.5 inch hollow suction drill bit was completely designed, fabricated and tested as a part of this thesis. This drill bit used a four carbide cutter, a carbon steel body and a HSS SDS Plus shank. It was meant to be used in the same drilling unit developed earlier. The vacuum drill bit was successfully tested on micro delaminations as small as 0.03 inches. A further use such as sampling concrete is demonstrated using a prototype which can be applied to sampling rocks and stone.