Watts per gallon as a measure of ultrasonic cleaning tank capability is under growing scrutiny. In a series of blogs over the next several weeks, I hope to explore the origin of watts per gallon and the changes and ambiguities which have brought its continued use as a measure of ultrasonic capability into question. Also, if …
In the process of parts cleaning, capillary flow can be our friend or our enemy – sometimes both at the same time. So let’s take a minute or two to understand this interesting phenomenon. Capillary flow is a property that is exhibited when liquids spontaneously penetrate narrow passageways. The classic example of a capillary (narrow passageway) …
We have all heard of servos (short for servomechanism) but exactly what characterizes a “servo” is often a cloudy topic. Most sources are in agreement that the centrifugal ball governor invented by James Watt and used to control the speed of steam engines was the first application of a powered servo mechanism. This eloquently simple …
Viscosity and surface tension are properties that are often intuitively linked to one another. Because these properties are of primary importance in cleaning it will be worth the while to understand them a bit better. Surface tension is the property of a liquid that exists at the interface of the liquid with another media (usually …
Adding water to cleaning and rinsing tanks is inevitable in a cleaning process. Most modern machines include a means to sense liquid level and add more water or other appropriate liquid as necessary. It would seem simple enough, but there are a lot of factors to consider in managing liquid makeup. The first thing to determine is …
Wrong! I don’t think most of us would consider using motor oil to moisten our dry skin. By the same token, we wouldn’t use body oil in our car’s engine. The notion seems to persist in the cleaning industry, however, that oil is oil. We often neglect to differentiate between oils when it comes to developing or recommending a …
As a prolog to the following let me just say, as I may have said before in this blog, that being an engineer is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because you intuitively understand how things work (or at least think you do) that other people see as magic, and a curse because …
Since DI water quality is critical to many cleaning processes, it is important to understand its behavior. In too many cases, the quest for numbers results in high costs in the use of DI water. In short, delivering super-high resistivity water does not always have a significant impact on the resistivity of de-ionized water in the ultimate application. …
De-ionized water is commonly used in both industrial and precision cleaning systems, primarily for rinsing. De-ionized water is a little like the speed of light or absolute zero in that you can never quite TOTALLY remove all the ions from the water (although we can get close) and, once a certain level of de-ionization is achieved, it …
Drying is almost always the longest step in a cleaning process. Because of this, anything that will speed up the drying process is of special interest to the process engineer. Hot air drying is, by far, the most common means of drying used in the industrial parts cleaning arena. Major variables in hot air drying are temperature, …
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