IANS | 02 Nov, 2023
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati incubated startup Beta
Tank Robotics (BetaTANK) on Wednesday announced two robotic solutions
that can efficiently maintain and clean petroleum tanks eliminating
manual labour for the hazardous task.
The robot to clean crude
oil tank bottom sludge will sweep tank bottom sludge, and pump it to a
receptacle outside the tank. These also have three very distinct USP
over its contemporaries in the world.
Another robot to water wash
and strip retail outlet petrol pump tanks will move inside the tank,
raise their arms, spread their arms, and water-wash the tanks, including
stripping the washings. This makes the gas freeing of these tanks easy,
risk-free, and fairly quick.
According to Captain D.
Chandrasekhar, founder of BetaTANK said, the robots are very compact and
of low-height that enables them to pass under the heating coils that
are found in many tanks.
The robot also has a pump that can use
discharge pressure to move the thick sludge through long distances,
which cannot be sucked out by a vacuum truck from outside.
“I
planned to make this robot in 1995, when as a ship's officer, I myself
was inside the ship’s oil tanks, overseeing some tank operations. I
believed a robotic solution was the way to work in such an environment.
That dream could not be realised for almost 3 decades -- until 2019,” he
said in a statement.
BetaTANK has been incubated at IIT
Guwahati’s Technology Incubation Centre (IITG-TIC) in the year 2019. It
has been funded under the flagship programme -- start-up India fund
‘Startup Nurturing, Enabling and Handholding (SNEH)” of OIL India
Limited.
Robots have a huge application in the oil and natural gas
industry particularly in situations where human entry poses significant
risks. Major oil corporations encounter potential liabilities and
reputational hazards when engaging in human entry into petroleum tanks.
“Tank
oil cleaning falls under the category of dull, dirty and dangerous
jobs, which now can be handed over to robots. Now the human operator
needs only to monitor the cleaning operation from the outside without
getting exposed to hazardous chemicals,” said Prof Uday Shanker Dixit,
Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Guwahati, and Mentor of
BetaTank.
“Although the products have been developed for the oil
industry, with slight modifications the same technology can be adopted
to cleaning of chemical tanks, sewage treatment plants, food processing
tanks etc,” he said.
