Objective:

Current depot-level DoD corrosion prevention and control operations are critical to maintaining the readiness and operational service life of air- and land-based weapon systems and support equipment. The corrosion protection afforded by any coating system, whether applied to the surfaces of ferrous or nonferrous metals, is dependent on the quality of pre-paint cleaning operations. Accurate real-time assessments of cleaning efficiency for large-area surfaces are difficult to measure and require the judgment of experienced production personnel. Areas that are inadequately cleaned will lead to end-of-process rejections, unnecessary reworking, and in-service coating failures. As a result, there is a tendency to overclean a soiled area to reduce the frequency of problems associated with undercleaning. Overcleaning consumes production time and capacity, slows subsequent maintenance operations, and increases processing costs and waste stream volume. Critical cleaning operations already have analytical support to determine cleanliness, but these methods are too expensive, slow, and cumbersome for widespread use. The objectives of this project are to verify the effectiveness of Visual Cleaning Performance Indicators (VCPI) for large-area cleaning operations, quantify the costs and benefits, and transition the technology to depot-level maintenance facilities.

Technology Description:

The scope of the recently completed Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) project, PP-1117, was to provide a VCPI system for determining when sufficient cleaning of contaminated surfaces has been achieved. With VCPI, classes of contaminants are labeled early in the cleaning process with trace amounts of a safe, environmentally acceptable commercial dye. The labeled areas identify locations where additional cleaning is needed. The cleaning process continues until all traces of the colored dye and the contaminant are removed. This technology is useful for a broad range of Department of Defense (DoD) cleaning needs. Laboratory and field-level testing have confirmed that VCPI is a low cost, real-time production tool for verifying cleaning efficiency without the involvement of sophisticated analytical instrumentation. This demonstration and validation effort will be performed by a joint Air Force, Navy, and Battelle Memorial Institute team and will focus on contaminants encountered during large-area aircraft and ship cleaning operations.

Expected Benefits:

The expected benefits to DoD from demonstrating and validating the VCPI surface cleaning verification technology include reduced coating adhesion failures, significant cost savings in operations, and reduced flow times. A preliminary economic analysis of a single VCPI application (e.g., full-scale surface preparation of a C-130 aircraft) suggests an overall savings of almost 50 percent in cleaning time, labor, and chemicals. Savings are estimated to be approximately $3.2 million when considering only the C-130 processed at depot and at contractor sites in a single year. Applied to other Air Force and Navy aircraft, these savings could translate into $10 to $15 million per year. Environmental drivers for VCPI include a need to significantly reduce the use, handling, on-site treatment, and disposal of hazardous chemicals used during current DoD large-area cleaning operations. (Anticipated Project Completion - 2006)