Development of a Rotary Cleaning Mechanism Using Planetary Gears for Removing Grease Deposited in Kitchen Ventilation Ducts

In this paper, it is proposed a grease dust cleaning mechanism using a planetary gear mechanism to remove accumulated grease in ventilation ducts.In existing research, cleaning robots have been developed to remove dust from air-conditioning ducts. The robot successfully removed dust from the ducts by rotating and scraping the brushes and using air pressure. However, no cleaning mechanism has been developed to remove the highly viscous grease that adheres to the ventilation ducts installed in restaurants. Thus, it is difficult to clean the oil and dust ducts, which are impenetrable.Therefore, in this paper, the authors propose a grease-cleaning mechanism using a planetary gear mechanism for cleaning grease from round ducts. This mechanism cleans the inside of the pipe by scrubbing off the grease from the walls by the rotation and revolution of the brush. This paper describes the selection of the cleaning mechanism, the modeling of the brush trajectory, the control method, and the evaluation experiment of the control method. The evaluation experiment of the control method confirmed the validity of the model and the fact that the brushes made contact with the entire inside of the pipe. This shows the possibility that the inside of the pipe could be efficiently cleaned by the intermittent collisions of the dispersed brushes.