JPL, NASA INVENTION AIDS SHIPS ROBOTIC DEVICE STRIPS PAINT WITHOUT POLLUTING WATERS.

Byline: Usha Sutliff Staff Writer

PASADENA - For years, shipping companies have used a laborious, expensive, environmentally unsafe sandblasting method to strip paint and rust from the hulls of huge tankers.

It was those concerns that prompted members of the shipping industry to turn to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for help.

The result is a robotic device that will safely strip paint faster, cheaper and without polluting the environment.

Sandblasting exposes workers to toxic paint dust, pollutes waters, kills fish and spews chemicals into the air for miles, environmentalists say. The work also costs millions of dollars and can put a ship out of commission for up to six months.

``We came up with a robot that has magnets that adhere to the metallic part of the ship and uses water pressure to basically remove the paint,'' said Neville Marzwell, head of Advanced Concepts and Technology Innovations at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The water is filtered and reused and the paint residue is collected in a container that can be disposed of safely, he said.

The process produces dried paint chips and clean water instead of toxic dust. Because a powerful vacuum collects the paint and water, no pollutants are able to escape into the environment.

The robotic technology was developed by JPL, the Robotics Engineering Consortium at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania and UltraStrip Systems Inc. in Florida.

The paint stripper was met with praise by Jean-Michel Cousteau, who runs a Santa Barbara-based company called Ocean Futures.

``Having now personally seen demonstrations of (the technology), I know the system works,'' said Cousteau, son of the late oceanographer Jacques Cousteau and an undersea explorer in his own right. ``It is inspiring to see a technology that can have such a positive impact on the environment while at the same time providing a benefit to the profitability of the shipyard industry.''

Charles Vinick, executive vice president of Ocean Futures, said the nonprofit company is a ``strategic partner'' of UltraStrip - the company that owns the patent on the technology - and will receive 2 percent of the gross revenue from sales of the product.

``Currently, the stripping process is a grit-blasting system which really blasts the paint off the side of ships and leaves tremendous amounts of residue . . . that all ends up dripping down the size of ships and being put into 50-gallon drums for taking to dump sites,'' Vinick said.

``In certain countries where they're are not as meticulous about recovering it, it goes into the ocean. It's a huge environmental problem because the paint is toxic. . . . This system eliminates that completely.''

JPL's Marzwell said the technology was developed as part of the National Robotics Engineering Consortium, a partnership between NASA, universities and the private sector formed in 1997.

``The idea here was to make a partnership with industry, with the purpose of really helping the economy and helping to make our U.S. industry more competitive in the global economy,'' he said.

Marzwell said products that will come out of the partnership include an automated harvester guided by a global positioning satellite and automated mining equipment that protects workers from exposure to toxins.

Another project in the works is a robot that will be able to detect leaks in underground gas pipes. Once detected, a sleeve will be deployed in the pipe to plug the hole, he said.

These robotics technologies - 39 so far - are developed at various NASA centers and funded by the space agency's Office of Space Science, which allocates $5 million a year for the effort.

A $700,000 prototype of the robotic paint stripper, for example, cost NASA about $200,000. The remaining $500,000 was contributed by the shipping industry, according to Marzwell.

``We don't make the technology and shove it down the throat of industry. Industry comes and seeks us (out), and then we need to see a commitment from them by seeing two-thirds of the cost,'' he said.

In the end, industry owns the technology, he added, creating a win-win situation. NASA has the technology ``on the shelf,'' the industry can use it and the universities are able to offer hands-on experience to students, Marzwell said.

In the coming months, NASA may be improving on the paint-stripping technology by developing a brush with sensors that will detect flecks of paint left on the hull.

All the products created as part of the consortium build on existing NASA technology, according to Marzwell. The goal is to create devices that will help solve key problems in various industries while reinvigorating the U.S. robotics industry.

``I use existing technology that has been proven (to work) and just re-engineer it into a product that makes money. I'm not interested in self-fantasy . . . (such as) a robot that dances. It doesn't justify NASA resources and NASA technology,'' Marzwell said.