Many cleaning specifications call for “Spot Free Drying.” I have always taken this to mean that there should be no visible water (or other) spots on the parts once they exit the cleaning process. The offending spots are usually created when water evaporates leaving behind a solid residue. The resulting residues or spots are cosmetically …
The use of some kind of chemistry is an important and unavoidable part of most industrial cleaning processes. Chemistries can remain effective for as little as a few hours or as long as a year or more depending on the chemistry and how it is used. In the end, however, cleaning chemistry must be disposed …
Somewhere along the way, maybe half a lifetime ago, I got involved in photography on a semi-professional basis. I photographed a bunch of weddings and also spent a lot of time cruising around back roads taking pictures of birds, colored leaves, snow banks, flowers and whatever else I thought was interesting that got in the …
Ultrasonic agitation of cleaning solutions is just one of many tools that can be used to facilitate and enhance a cleaning process. High frequency vibrations are introduced into a bath of liquid cleaning solution by specially designed devices called transducers which are similar in concept to loudspeakers but designed to operate at much higher sound …
Just about every cleaning process is performed in the interest of providing a clean part. This makes the “deliverable” a clean part! Part cleanliness, however, is often not the variable that is tracked in the interest of quality control. Let’s talk about that. It would be nice if there was a simple way to test …
Cleaning sample parts in a test laboratory is one of the logical first steps in the development of a cleaning process and the subsequent specification of cleaning hardware to perform that process. Earlier in my life, as the test lab manager for one of the largest suppliers of ultrasonic cleaning equipment in the world, I …
In my experience, drying deserves a lot more attention than is usually gets in the design of a cleaning system. If for no other reason, drying deserves extra attention because it is almost always the most time-consuming of all steps in the parts cleaning process.
The cleaning process is really just an exercise of removing contamination from the surface being cleaned and moving it to a segregated location for collection and disposal. This is accomplished in a number of ways depending on the volume and nature of the contamination. Solid contamination that is more dense than the cleaning media (usually …
Today’s industrial parts cleaning processes commonly employ at least three distinct steps. The basic steps are Washing, Rinsing, and Drying. Each step is custom tailored to the overall requirement with the range of options for each much broader than one not intimately involved with the technology might imagine. In some processes, in fact, it is …
I will be the first person to advocate cleaning trials in the laboratory as an important step in the development of a cleaning process. I will also be the first to admit that in over fifty years of lab testing I have made (and hopefully learned from) more than a few mistakes made in the …
English
Spanish
Chinese
Canada
Mexico
United Kingdom
