AM2 Coating for Better Aircraft Landing Surfaces
Researchers at the Geotechnical and Structures Lab are testing AM2 matting, an aluminum matting system developed in the 1960s to provide temporary aircraft landing surfaces. Watch this video to learn more about AM2, which provides a critical force projection capability.
Transcript
00:00:00 my name is Brett Cobb I'm a research civil engineer here at the ertic uh today we are working on the resurfacing of am2 uh project is where we're looking at applications from completely removing the OEM coating and then what it takes to uh clean the surface and then reapply a new coating to give better performance and longer lasting life cycle for the mat itself as of right now when a unit
00:00:29 goes out to remove matting it takes 15 to 25 military members to remove the the matting takes them a couple of days to do it they're all wore out when they're done then it takes the 8 Monon process for it to get Shi back and then back to them now what we're looking at is never picking up the mat removing the coating from the mat itself and then reapplying a coating but it's also has a longer
00:00:54 life cycle than the OEM within one day you can remove the coating within one day you can coat it and then within 3 days in total you can land a plane back on it drastically less time drastically less money and drastically less effort for our war Fighters we're actually able to have military members out here today to see their thoughts and their opinions because it matters most what they think
00:01:17 I can't have a tool that works great but they don't want to use it we've looked at multiple different scenarios on what it would take to remove the coating we wanted the the most environmentally friendly solution to be able to remove the coating so if you could blast it with a pressure washer and contain it which we've found how then you are able to collect all of the debris into a
00:01:39 catchment basin when the water evaporates then all you have is the dust we pour the coating on from a 5 gallon bucket squeegee it with apparatuses that we've developed to attach the squeegees and then it's good to go within 10 hours you can walk on it the first couple of tests that we did we found some things that we needed to fix in the coating to make it better uh use and and
00:02:02 application method for the military members but other than that I think that we've gotten to our final form of the coding and all we have to do now is build the kit one of the biggest parts of this project is to develop a kit so all they had to do is pull the equipment out and start using for developing criteria and the equipment and all the accessories to do that we found that
00:02:21 within a 20ft conx that you can package everything and ship it to wherever it needs to go Aggregate and the coding come uh separately packaged it's already ratioed in a in a bag in a 5 gallon bucket you mix it right before uh you apply it with just a simple drill mixer and then you can pour it on as fast as you can apply it so not only does it save time it saves energy it saves
00:02:44 Manpower and it saves money most importantly we're looking at a 50% reduction in costs in using this method instead of using Manpower [Music]