efficient, requiring large volumes of materials that must be disposed of in an approved manner upon completion of the stripping procedure. For example, conventional aircraft paint removal methods are increasingly under fire from many regulatory agencies, posing a problem for commercial and military operators. Moreover, some solvents such as methylene chloride are suspected human carcinogen agents, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has classified these solvents as hazardous air pollutants. The costs associated with chemical stripping are astronomical, and the process is labor-intensive, consuming from a few hundred hours to as much as a few thousand hours depending on the aircraft part and the size of the aircraft. In addition, operational costs include special safety apparel, the cost of waste containment/disposal and facility/equipment maintenance costs. In most current practices, operational difficulties include the need for multiple chemical applications to remove the coatings, and a large degree of hand sanding in areas where the coatings remain after the chemical stripping.
More recently, other methods with lower environmental impact have been developed and generally fall into three categories: (a) the use of less toxic chemicals; (b) impact blasting of the paint coating including: plastic media blasting (PMB), laser stripping, aqua jet, CO2-pellet blasting, starch or vegetable media blasting or ice-blasting; and, (c) vaporization of the paint via concentrated heat and/or light energy, e.g., laser stripping. Combinations of these methods also have been evaluated, including the FlashJet process wherein a pulsed xenon flash lamp initially vaporizes the paint coating into a fine ash residue. This residue is subsequently swept by a frozen carbon dioxide-pellet blast into a multistage collection system of filters and activated charcoal scrubber. However, these alternative methods, some of which are at a relatively mature stage of development, are not without problems. For example, the PMB procedure mus