Cleaning Sydney Harbour Bridge with Robotic Lasers (Long Version)

Physics ANU
Physics ANU
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Published 2024-07-29
It’s a mammoth job to clean and repaint the outside of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and that’s before you consider more than 7 km of tunnels which are inaccessible to humans.

The answer, say ANU physicists, is to send in a robot, who can clean the bridge with a laser!

This video includes interviews with all the partners at Transport NSW, ANSTO, University of Sydney and University of Canberra. For a shorter ANU edit, visit:    • Cleaning Sydney Harbour Bridge with R...  

The team has developed a technique using the latest lasers, which deliver pulses that are so short (mere thousands of billionths of a second) that they burn off only paint, rust and dirt without doing any damage whatsoever to the steel or granite underneath.

It’s much cleaner than the current method – sandblasting – and more energy efficient.

It works in the lab – the challenge is now to make a portable system for the robots to carry.
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