“The RAAM lab is a joint venture between the Air Force and UDRI,” said Michael Pratt, senior advanced manufacturing engineer for the university.
The centerpiece at work in the lab is called a “RoboCLASP,” a robotic, “ultra-fast” laser developed with Air Force funding, UDRI said.
The laser generates “ultra-short, high-energy pulses of light to remove resin from composites without damage to the material,” the institute said.
“This is a world-class technology at the University of Dayton Research Institute,” Pratt said. “As far as we can find in our research, we were the first organization in the world to deploy and integrate a femtosecond laser into a portable and handheld system, and we are now the only organization in the U.S. that is actively developing a robotically integrated system for this application.”
Removing resin quickly and in a non-destructive way is no small matter, the university said. The process of hand-sanding composites to prepare them for bonding is not only time- and labor-intensive, it requires the operator to wear a hazmat suit because the process generates waste in the form of plastic media, Pratt said.
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