SBIR-STTR Award

During the refurbishment of turbine engine parts, various coatings are applied to well-defined areas to meet specification. Uncoated surfaces are protected by a mask during the coating process. Masking materials typically include wax, tape, plastics, lacquers, or a variety of permanent masks. The time required to adequately mask a part using any of these methods is excessive, and creates a bottleneck in the turbine engine repair workflow. The 76th Propulsion Maintenance Group (PMXG) at Tinker Air Force Base is seeking to automate the application of UV-curable maskants for plating and other coating processes to further increase throughput across all coating processes (e.g. plating, plasma spray, HVOF, painting, etc.).To meet PMXGs needs, Systems & Materials Research Corporation (SMRC) will develop an automated UV-curable mask application system to support the 76th PMXG plating line. In Phase I, feasibility of SMRCs system will be proven by demonstrating the application of a UV-curable maskant to representative turbine engine vanes with well-defined mask edges, creating a notional design of the automated UV-curable mask application system scalable to other parts and coating processes, and developing a cost benefit analysis model to compare the cost of automating mask application to traditional masking processes.