CLEANING WITH DRY ICE
No one facility is the same as the next one. Every industrial plant or its parts to be cleaned requires an ideally tailored method for cleaning. This should achieve the best possible cleaning results, protect the plant, guarantee consistent levels of production quality and be as environmentally friendly as possible.
WHAT IS DRY ICE CLEANING
Compared to the laser method, dry ice cleaning generally achieves higher surface cleaning levels.
Dry ice is not electrically conductive, is chemically inert, non-toxic and non-combustible. By contrast with other blasting media, dry ice is residue-free as it goes directly from the solid to the gaseous state at ambient pressure without liquefaction – it sublimes.
Another advantage of this minimally abrasive and non-corrosive process lies in the low levels of damage to the material to be cleaned.
Depending on the working pressures involved, the nozzle geometry and the type of soiling, stripping rates of more than one square metre per minute are possible. In this innovative process, coatings and impurities with a thickness of between 1 mm and 10 mm can be ablated in a manner that goes easy on the surface.
The handling of the dry ice method is unproblematic and does not place any special demands upon the surrounding environment. The high working pressure involved when cleaning with dry ice results in a higher noise level than in the laser process. If the dry ice process is integrated within the ongoing production processes, e.g. through automation, then we will ensure the appropriate noise insulation.
The advantages:
No residues of the blast material
Low running costs
Gentle cleaning
Reaching of high surface cleaning levels is possible
No chemical additives required
not electrically conductive
chemically inert
Non-toxic
Non-flammable
How does cleaning with dry ice work?
The dry ice blasting process that is gentle on the surfaces enables efficient cleaning of a wide range of components and machines with complicated and sensitive surfaces without residues of cleaning agents. In this way our machining times can be shortened and plant downtimes reduced.
Under certain conditions, dry ice blasting is also suitable for the degreasing of surfaces due to the fact dry ice, if used accordingly, has similar properties to solvents.
Our application engineers face new challenges every day and develop new applications for industry. We are thus able to use the dry ice method economically and efficiently in almost all industrial sectors.
For the cleaning, the dry ice particles are for instance accelerated, with 5000 liters of air per minute and impact with the material to be cleaned at the speed of sound. In this way the layer that is to be stripped off is locally supercooled and becomes brittle. The following dry ice particles penetrate into the brittle cracks and sublimate abruptly on impact. The carbon dioxide becomes gaseous and increases its volume by some 700 to 1000 times in the process. It blasts the dirt off the surface in the process.
Step 1:
Dry ice pellets impact against the dirt layer at almost the speed of sound. The dirt layer is super-cooled to approx. -80° C, shrinks and begins to crack. The temperature of the material surface only drops slightly here.
Step 2:
The ice pellets switch to a gaseous state upon impact and their volume abruptly increases some 800 times.
Step 3:
Here they blast the coating off the base material. Due to the fact the ice pellets are not particularly hard, relatively soft subsurfaces also remain largely undamaged.
Step 4:
The gaseous carbon dioxide is released back into the atmosphere from which it was obtained, only the residues have to be removed.