by Brianna Crandall — February 26, 2016—BOC, supplier of industrial gases and medical gases in the U.K. and Ireland, officially launched the CRYOCLEAN snow+ industrial cleaning process at BOC’s Manufacturing Technology Centre recently.
CRYOCLEAN snow+ combines dry ice blasting (using CO2 dry ice crystals) with sand blasting to provide a flexible industrial cleaning method for a wide range of industry sectors including automotive, aerospace, additive manufacturing, construction, food, metal and machine construction, pharmaceuticals, plastic manufacturing and steel.
The CRYOCLEAN process can be used to clean industrial products such as machinery, process equipment and conveyor belts.
This new process can be used to clean industrial products such as machinery, process equipment and conveyor belts.
CRYOCLEAN snow+ is also useful in the new, fast-growing additive manufacturing sector, where it can be used to remove oxides from the surfaces of a number of materials, including steels and aluminum, and to clean polymers.
By changing the ratio of carbon dioxide (CO2) and abrasive material, the operator can adjust the intensity of the cleaning process to match the condition of the surface.
This is particularly useful where cleaning challenges vary within a process flow, with relatively clean areas followed by heavily soiled, chemically altered or even corroded zones, explains BOC.
Developed by BOC and its parent, The Linde Group, CRYOCLEAN is a completely dry cleaning process in which liquid CO2 is pressurized to 60 bar, creating tiny dry ice crystals known as “snow.”
When the snow is accelerated onto the component using compressed air, the contaminant becomes brittle. The gas jet then permeates cracks and lifts the contaminant off the surface — after which it is expelled through exhaust systems.
CRYOCLEAN snow+ combines dry ice blasting with sand blasting to provide a flexible industrial cleaning method for a wide range of industry sectors
Traditional cleaning processes used to clean plastic parts in the automotive industry are water-based and are much slower and require much larger footprints, contends BOC. A car bumper, for example, may take 5-10 minutes to clean using a wet system, and with a footprint of 100 m2, compared to 30 seconds using CRYOCLEAN snow, with a footprint of around 20 m2.
The patented CRYOCLEAN process cleans surface oxides from steel and aluminum and is particularly valuable for cleaning operations that require different degrees of intensity, says BOC.
By maximizing its cleaning flexibility from the gentle to abrasive, CRYOCLEAN snow+ achieves the required cleaning results at any time and by using only the correct quantity of abrasives, thereby reducing wastage.
The CRYOCLEAN process provides a significantly more environmentally friendly, efficient and reliable alternative to traditional industrial cleaning processes, says BOC.
As an added environmental aspect, the CO2 used is a byproduct from BOC’s existing customer manufacturing processes that has been purified before being reused within the CRYOCLEAN process.
For more information visit the CRYOCLEAN snow+ Web page.
