Increasing Fleet Readiness With Quiet Dry Ice Blasting

The USAF operates the most sophisticated fighter aircraft in the world, The F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning. These platforms are the USAF’s most capable ever; able to outmaneuver and outgun our enemies with superior speed, accuracy, and stealth. However the USAF is currently struggling to keep these and other mission-critical aircraft flight ready, with a growing backlog of aircraft needing maintenance. In 2017, only 49% of the USAF F-22s were mission capable. Dry Ice Blasting is an enabling technology with many key benefits that could be used to expedite MRO processes. This method for cleaning and removing coatings and corrosion is fast, clean, gentle on composite substrates, and is particularly effective on resilient coatings that conventional abrasive blasting struggles to remove. However there is one major obstacle keeping dry ice blasting from being used to solve the Air Force’s growing fleet readiness issue; the noise. Dry ice blasting can generate sound levels over 130 dB(A). Personnel exposures to these sound levels are very strictly limited. Figure is proposing to adapt their StealthStrip™ low-noise abrasive blasting technology for use in dry ice blasting, significantly lowering the sound generated by the process and enabling it for use in aircraft MRO processes.