Aspects Regarding of a UGV Fire Fighting thermal shield

This article presents aspects related to the protection with a double shield, made of stainless steel, of a robot for emergency situations against the effect of flames due to a fire. The ground robot is semi-autonomous / autonomous, with a wheeled propeller (6x6). The robot, designed and built at TRL 2 level, is intended for fire investigation, monitoring and intervention, in particular for petrochemical plants. The role of the shield is to protect the equipment that is part of the robot, such as: controllers, sensors, communications, power supply, etc. The need to mount a thermal protection shield on the intervention robot was given by the fact that fires at petrochemical plants generate very large thermal fields and gradients, which on the one hand are responsible for creating blind spots. These blind spots do not allow intervention crews to see what is happening in that area. These blind spots are characterized by very high temperatures. The dynamics of fires is unpredictable, therefore, to analyse the performance of the heat shield, we will perform a numerical-experimental analysis.