Portable High-Energy Semicoductor Diode Lasers for Interior Ship Coatings Removal

The main Phase II objective is to construct a portable commercial grade self-contained High Power Diode Laser system with vacuum filtration/recovery that is hardened for a shipyard environment. The system design will be based upon a 1000-Watt fiber coupled diode laser, will include integrated feedback sensors to ensure protection of composite substrates, and will be optimized for production. A prototype system will be constructed and field-tested in participating shipyards on both surface and subsurface ships. Lessons learned will be used to optimize the design, and to design and to construct the necessary laser head tooling required to perform surface preparation on the various areas and shapes found on the internal ship compartments. The system design will be finalized based upon the field tests and human factors engineering testing in order to modify the prototype unit into a representative production unit optimized for Phase III transition.