A Study on the Thermal Analysis for the Robotic Arm of the Cord Blood Storage Tank

Umbilical cord blood has been recently considered an attractive potential alternative as a source of stem cell transplantation to curing diseases such as leukemia, cancers, immune disorders. Normally the stored system of the umbilical cord blood specimen is equipped with a computer-controlled robotic arm that enables the samples to locate the identification places in liquid nitrogen tank at regulated temperature as about $-196^{\circ}C$. As the half of robotic arm is in the air and the rest part is submerged in liquid nitrogen, the temperature of robotic arm varies from ambient to liquid nitrogen temperature. In this study the temperature variation of upper part of arm above tank lid was thermally analysed by using the commercial code of Ansys. The result of analysis was that the upper part of robotic arm was seriously frozen due to heat transfer from liquid nitrogen as low as -$120^{\circ}C$. In order to solve the frost problem of robotic arm, small PTFE tube block as resistance material was introduced into the lower part of tank lid instead of the whole stainless steel(SUS) robotic arm. The results showed that the temperature of robotic arm above the lid was higher enough, and this method would be one of the very effective measure to solve the problem.

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