Laser cleaning of rust on ship steel using TEA CO2 pulsed laser

Ship is easy to rust because of its special working condition. Removal of the rust from the ship surface is generally required for maintaining ship. The feasibility of removing rust using pulsed laser has been confirmed by the past researches. However, the general utilized laser, e.g., pulsed Nd: YAG laser with narrow pulse duration and high peak power, suffers very low average power and throughput. TEA CO2 laser, which also has narrow pulse duration and high peak power, is expected to obtain high throughout because it is easy to obtain high average power. This paper investigated the feasibility and the efficiency of removal of rust from the ship steel using TEA CO2 pulsed laser. The results show that TEA CO2 pulsed laser can effectively clean the rust by using suitable parameters without damage the substrate. A cleaning threshold for stripping rust of power density exists. Also, the effect of the process parameters on the efficiency and performance as well as the removal mechanism were studied in this paper.