A light and modular glovebox for hazardous material machining

A Glovebox is a sealed enclosure that allows handling materials while keeping them isolated from the external environment. It is widely used in scientific laboratories, industry, and various technical fields. Usually, a glovebox is a standard, monolithic structure purchased from a supplier, with little customization. This work presents a novel approach to the design of gloveboxes. It acts as a design methodology based on using off-the-shelf, lightweight yet robust structural parts, employing a modular architecture. Key advantages include the possibility of being assembled "on site" with simple tools (no welding required), with the possibility of integrating robotic manipulators. The approach enables the design of solutions to be adapted to existing laboratory environments without modifying the surrounding infrastructure. To illustrate the advantages, a representative albeit challenging use case has been identified: the repair of Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastics (CFRP), where the Glovebox encloses and executes the scarfing (sanding) process. More broadly, the approach can be evaluated in any situation requiring controlled interaction between isolated internal environments and external laboratory or industrial settings. The CFRP Glovebox prototype has been built in our laboratory and is ready for use by expert operators under continuous supervision, and eventually in a manufacturing context. This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0).