Development of the Maintenance Process Using Virtual Prototyping for the Equipment in the MSM's Unreachable Area of the Hot cell

The process equipment for handling high level radioactive materials like spent fuels is operated in a hot cell, due to high radioactivity. Thus, this equipment should be maintained and repaired optimally by a remotely operated manipulator. The master-slave manipulators(MSM) are widely used as a remote handling device in the hot cell. The equipment in the hot cell should be optimally placed within the workspace of the wall-mounted slave manipulator for the maintenance operation. But, because of the complexity in the hot cell, there would be some parts of the equipment that are not reached by the MSM. In this study, the maintenance process for these parts of the equipment is developed using virtual prototyping technology. To analyze the workspace of the maintenance device in the hot cell and to develop the maintenance processes for the process equipment, the virtual mock-up of the hot cell for the spent fuel handling process is implemented using IGRIP. For the implementation of the virtual mock-up, the parts of the equipment and maintenance devices such as the MSM and servo manipulator are modeled and assembled in 3-D graphics, and the appropriate kinematics are assigned. Also, the virtual workcell of the spent fuel management process is implemented in the graphical environment, which is the same as the real environment. Using this mock-up, the workspace of the manipulators in the hot cell and the operator's view through the wall-mounted lead glass are analyzed. Also, for the dedicated maintenance operation, the analyses for the detailed area of the end effectors in accordance with the slave manipulator's position and orientation are carried out. The parts of the equipment that are located outside of the MSM's workspace are specified and the maintenance process of the parts using the servo manipulator that is mounted in the hot cell is proposed. To monitor the process in the hot cell remotely, the virtual display system by a virtual camera in the virtual work cell is also proposed. And the graphic simulation using a virtual mock-up is performed to verify the proposed maintenance process. The maintenance process proposed in this study can be effectively used in the real hot cell operation and the implemented virtual mock-up can be used for analyzing the various hot cell operations and enhancing the reliability and safety of the spent fuel management.