U.S. PATENT AWARDED TO CASRM DESIGN TEAM

Two associate professors of engineering technology, Steven Wells and Chen Lin, along with tom Fox, executive director of the Center for Advanced Ship Repair and Maintenance, are members of a design team recently awarded a patent for inventing and developing an automated paint blasting machine, the CASRM Bottom Blaster.

the system employed by the blaster is designed to replace the practice of open blasting, a manual, labor-intensive, slow process that creates environmental hazards.

The Bottom Blaster blasts old paint off ships' hulls by means of a closed-cycle blasting. This entails a system of rotating wheel blasters which throw abrasive at an enclosed, sealed surface. All the spent abrasive is collected, cleaned and reused, while the dusty rust and paint debris end up in a collector.