Engineering360: "A laser cleaning process for ship hulls"

My company, General Lasertronics Corporation, specializes in laser ablation of all kinds of coatings. We have spoken with shipyards about using lasers to replace media and water blast in their hull stripping operations. Consensus is that until multi-kW pulsed lasers come down quite a bit in cost, lasers are not a practical alternative. The reason is that the most expensive component of hull stripping work is the time the vessel is lost to service while the stripping takes place. This is true whether the ship is commercial or defense. While lasers work great, can be used underwater, and nearly eliminate the waste stream, they are slow for thick coatings such as hull paint or the biofouling that forms on hulls. Normally, both are removed together in drydock. Matching the current turnaround times of blasting systems would require many high powered lasers, which are currently far more expensive to buy than the equivalent blasting equipment. I wonder whether Fraunhofer IFAM and their collaborators have made some breakthrough here that enables lasers to be a practical replacement for blasting ship hulls. Obviously, stationary structures would not require the fast turnaround of ships, so lasers may work well enough there.