A mathematical model for surface roughness of ship hull grit blasting

Surface cleaning and blasting for the ship hull of oil tankers and passenger ships are conventional operations in a ship yard with surface roughness requirements. Several process parameters affect the blasting quality outcome, such as the distance between the blasting nozzles and ship hull, feed rate of copper grit, grit size, etc. In this paper, a mathematical model is derived to describe the relationship between several input parameters and blasting quality. In addition, a blasting experiment is designed using the Taguchi method in order to reduce the number of experiments required for validating the proposed model. Due to resource and time constraints, the experiments will be carried out as future work.