Development of the Attachable Skin for Enhancing the Thermal Resistance of Robots

Abstract

Intense heat from fire can result in significant damage to firefighting robots. To avoid this damage, numerous studies have been conducted on the thermal insulation of firefighting robots using electrical motors and sensors that can not withstand high temperatures. In this paper, we present an attachable skin for enhancing the thermal resistance of firefighting robots using polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), where a wet chemical extinguishing agent is injected into the holes on PDMS. The pilot experiment was conducted to verify the thermal insulation performance of a wet chemical extinguishing agent compared to water. Several experiments were also carried out with different diameters, depths, shapes, and degrees of PDMS holes to determine optimum hole dimensions. The results demonstrated that the thermal resistance of PDMS skin is related to the capacity of the wet chemical extinguishing agent. In addition, the performance of the PDMS skin can be verified by its variation according to the ignition time.