Dry Ice Blasting and Conveyor Maintenance

You seem to be...

Elaborate please, seems interesting.

Dry ice blasting is a completeley dry cleaning process, no chemicals, solvents, no water, no wetness. Equipment can be cleaned with minimal or no downtime (during production). This also means it is non-conductive and is often used on live electrical componenets. It is non-abrasive, so there is no harm done. The cleaning media consists of air and dry ice only, the dry ice immediatly dissipates back into the air upon contact so there is no cleaning media to deal with (discard,etc). Also, dry ice blasting has a very wide range of how aggressive it can clean so things like pc boards, sensors, wiring, etc can be cleaned and on the other end you can clean off years of grit, grime, grease, paint, etc.

So,

What are you selling?

Thank you for your reply. My interest in discussion of dry ice blasting applications. I understand this forum is not for promoting goods or services and do not intend to use it for that purpose. Yes I work as a salesman in the industry however I have no intention of selling anything on this site.

Dry ice blasting has so many applications as well as CO2 and my interest in sharing information on both, as well as many other topics.

We used it here for a few years cleaning overspray paint off fixtures and parts of the conveyor line. We could specify the pellet size that was delivered so that it was suitable to our process.

We "rumble" cleaned the parts in a home size cement mixer lined with wooden panels. The ice pellets performed two tasks, firstly making the paint cold and thus more brittle and then as an abrasive medium on th esurfaces.

It was believed that the localised contact of the ice converting from solid to gas gave similar effect to cavitation observed in ultrasonic cleaning.

In our case it was better than rumbling without the ice (Less damage to the fixtures and better outcome for removal of the overspray residue) but has been discontinued in favour of a solvent based process where we now recover the solvent for re-use.

I've seen examples where it's used in electronics for localised removal of conformal coating and such to enable rework of components on boards being repaired.

From an environmental viewpoint, I'm not sure. The energy to produce the ice is substantial and the gas released is of course CO2, but that probably came from an environmental release anyway.

This is interesting, I've seen it used on the fixtures and conveyor line but obviously you didn't have measurable success. I'm curious what those reasons are.

I have also seen it used for the elctronics application you mentioned and I understand that the gas companies do produce it from recaptured CO2 being produced as a by product.

OK,

Let me try again.

What is the question?