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Keeping manufacturing equipment clean and free of debris is never an easy job. Some product ingredients can become almost cement-like when exposed to moisture. When such adherents become caked onto sensitive equipment, finding a cleaning method forceful enough to remove it without risk of equipment damage can seem like a daunting task. Some facility managers resort to hand cleaning.
Now, imagine a piece of manufacturing equipment that coats giant sheets of laminate with glue. The glue gets pretty much everywhere and, being glue, it’s meant to stick wherever it lands.
That was the challenge facing a Midwestern manufacturer of laminate for recreational vehicle interiors. The process left glue everywhere, including the floor, where it mixed with dust and created cement-like deposits. Hand cleaning of the machine that coats boards with glue was increasingly time-consuming.
An Alternative to Tedious Hand Cleaning
Cleaning the machine and surrounding areas took three days for 10 people to do by hand, and the process was burning through the electrical tools they were using.
Then one day, the company’s continuous improvement engineer happened to be touring a facility where office furniture was manufactured using similar equipment to glue laminate boards. The engineer couldn’t help but notice how clean the facility was. Where was all the glue?
The answer: The office furniture manufacturer had a dry ice blasting company that came in every six months with a process that used no water, no chemicals, and left the equipment free of glue without leaving any collateral mess or moisture behind.
4X Faster Results with Dry Ice Blasting
The recreational vehicle parts manufacturer decided to give it a try and discovered the many advantages of dry ice (CO2) cryo blasting services. This was not only four to five times faster than hand cleaning, but also able to clean inside nooks and crannies that hand cleaning could not reach.
The company’s continuous improvement engineer saw far more than time and labor savings in the comparison: it was also an opportunity to transform downtime into production time – eliminating both wasted time and materials.
“I would rather be running product for my customers than doing deep cleaning,” the engineer said. “My customers don’t care what I have to do to get my machine clean. My customers care about product.”
Cleaning Reveals Hidden Controls, Wires & Buttons
Some of the nooks and crannies were concealing non-functioning buttons, wires and controls that had disappeared under layers of glue. Dry ice cleaning enabled critical maintenance and part replacement that likely added years to the life of the equipment. Extending the life of a key piece of machinery that would have taken a year to replace was an incredible bonus.
How Dry Ice Blasting Saved Time & Money
- $50,000:estimated cost of replacing the board coater machine
- 12 Months:minimum wait time for replacement of board coating machine
- 1 Day:required to clean the entire board coater with dry ice
Among the other advantages of dry ice cleaning is that it is water free and the pellets sublimate on contact, leaving behind no secondary debris that could compromise the equipment.
The results were so clean that the company decided to incorporate dry ice blasting into a second manufacturing facility.
“We are very happy with the results,” the engineer said, adding that the cleanliness of the work area has also been a morale booster and led to teams taking better care of the equipment. The only regret? “I wish we would have known about dry ice blasting sooner.”
Dry Ice Blasting for Sticky Jobs
It’s not hard to see why dry ice blasting is the cleaning method of choice for industries with sticky, tedious, hard-to-reach or otherwise challenging applications that require deep cleaning without the risk that water and abrasive cleaning techniques can introduce. For some applications, like the removal of stubbornly adhered paint, dry ice blasting can be used in combination with non-abrasive sponge blasting, which is also water free and less abrasive than traditional sand blasting.
Look for a dry ice cleaning provider with expertise in industries with the highest standards of safety, cleaning and efficiency, including power generation, food and beverage manufacturing and petrochemical manufacturing, among others.
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