ANALYTICAL, NUMERICAL, AND EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF A ROBOT CONTROLLER WITH A FORCED COOLING SYSTEM

Abstract

Recently, an increasing need for unusual and more demanding tasks to be performed by robots in automotive, aerospace, food, and beverage industries can be observed. At the same time, compactness is an essential factor influencing the design of modern robot controllers, whereas the size and weight reduction makes thermal management in electric devices much more required than in the past device generations. In this article, an analytical, numerical, and experimental approach to optimization of thermal management in an ABB IRC5 robot controller is presented. Both the fundamentals of the developed approach and the results of investigations are discussed including indications regarding the design improvement.