Mechanical Design of a Modular Underwater Rov for Surveillance and Cleaning Purpose

The surveillance and cleaning of the cooling pipes in nuclear power plants is a tedious task, as these pipes are dimensionally huge and submerged under the sea. In this paper, we present the design process of a modular underwater remotely operated vehicle (ROV) for surveillance and cleaning purposes of the cooling pipelines at Nuclear Power Plant. We divided the design into five sections: structure, propulsion system, electronic system, illumination system and modular attachments. The iterative design process includes computer-aided design (CAD), finite elements analysis (FEA) and, computational fluid dynamics (CFD). We have tried to make the design modular while keeping the basic structure of ROV the same. This will save the costs of using different ROVs for different tasks while making the control easier as each of these modules will have their power supply and electronics and will only receive instructions from the parent ROV. Also, there are many ROVs available in the market that are being used for the surveillance purpose so here our objective is to use the materials and systems with minimal cost to make the design cost-effective for the purpose required.