Garmire's Lasers Zap Graffiti Clean
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| Audience/Grade: | College Freshman-Continuing Education |
| Discipline(s): |
Electrical Engineering Entrepreneurship and Innovation |
| Special Topic(s): | |
| Learning Resource Type: |
Reference - Article/Document |
| Media Type: |
Unknown |
| Author(s): |
Eric mankin |
| Description: | News article, September 9, 1993. Excerpt: "A new space-age weapon may soon enter the arsenal in the continuing battle against graffiti. Elsa Garmire, director of the Center for Laser Studies, is now developing a portable laser to erase spray-painted messages from stone, brick, trees, and other unpainted surfaces. In an extensive series of tests last year, Garmire and CLS research associate Katherine Liu evaluated the potential effectiveness of lasers in cleaning up graffiti. In June, Garmire presented a dramatic media demonstration, vaporizing paint with a lab laser as cameras from almost all Los Angeles television stations rolled. The bottom line: "It looks like a portable laser system could remove graffiti from more than one square yard of wall every 10 minutes." According to Garmire, such a system, powered by a portable generator, could be housed on a small trailer, cost $80,000 to $100,000, and have a lifetime of approximately 10 years. According to her calculations, a clean-up service using such a device could charge about $200 to clean 20 square yards of surface. This would be competitive with existing methods for removing graffiti, such as sandblasting. No such portable system now exists, however. Garmire's research and media demonstration used commercial units that are both too heavy and too fragile for field use. But Garmire said a prototype of a mobile system could be ready for field testing in as little as a year." |
| Rating: |
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| Related Resources | |
| Keywords: | lasers Elsa Garmire |
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| Related ABET Criteria: |
(c) Design a system, component, or process |
| Version Info | |
| Publication Date: | September 1993 |
| Platform/Format: |
WWW |
| Cost: |
Free |
| Download URL: | http://www.usc.edu/uscnews/stories/360.html |
| Metadata: |
IEEE LOM Record |
| Collection: |
NEEDS
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