Abstract
The Blue Grass Army Depot (BGAD) has modified its bomb renovation facility system to incorporate the thermal wire-arc spray (“metallizing”) process for “lifetime” corrosion protection on general-purpose bomb casings. Along with upgrades to existing abrasive blast and conventional painting systems, BGAD retrofitted and integrated a dedicated booth and dust filtration/collection system for spraying 85/15 zinc/aluminum sacrificial alloy in the production renovation conveyor line. Bombs are now brought in from field storage, inspected and grit-blasted to remove existing coatings and corrosion, metallized, top-coated with waterborne direct-to-metal latex paint, stenciled and re-palletized. The resulting environmentally compliant coating system extends the current 5-year inspection/renovation cycle to a minimum of 20 years, yielding substantially lower life-cycle costs and outstanding levels of asset availability. The work is performed under strict Q/A, Q/C and Standard Operating Procedures jointly developed by Blue Grass and the Air Force for this process. BGAD has validated its production metallizing renovation capability on an initial run of over 6000 MK-82, 500-pound (227 kg) bombs under contract to the Air Force. The facility is capable of renovating general-purpose bombs up to and including MK-84, 2000-pound (907 kg) munitions.
