Parts cleaning has become a quality critical manufacturing step in all industry sectors. It takes great effort to reproducibly meet particulate and film-type cleanliness specifications. Cleaning needs to be done at the lowest possible cost and highly sustainable. These contradictory requirements imperatively call for processes and machines tailored to specific needs.
From machine and plant engineering, electrical and power engineering to connecting elements, the industry contains a multitude of sectors. Components of the most diverse materials like metals, plastics, ceramic, and composite materials are manufactured and processed using very different manufacturing technologies. Products include cast and machined parts, stamped, bent, pressed and deep-drawn parts, hydraulic parts, and additively manufactured components. Although the parts are manifold, they have one thing in common: to ensure the quality of downstream processes such as machining, heat treatment, coating, bonding, and assembly and to guarantee lasting functionality, they necessitate cleanliness levels in line with requirements. In many areas, ever higher requirements concerning particulate and film-type cleanliness must be met. There are often added challenges such as high throughput rates and weights, a strongly varying range of parts to be cleaned, short delivery times, and small margins.
Adapting cleaning processes to tasks on hand
This means there are different requirements for part cleaning. As supplier of complete future-oriented, flexible, and energy-efficient solutions for industrial parts cleaning, Ecoclean covers the complete range of wet-chemical procedures. Cleaning processes and systems for batch or single-part cleaning can be optimally adapted to the respective specifications. Consider material, size, geometry and weight of the part, type and quantity of contaminants, downstream process and the resulting cleanliness specifications and throughput requirements. It can be determined whether the contaminants can be removed most effectively with a water-based detergent, an environment-friendly solvent, or a modified alcohol with lipophilic and hydrophilic properties, enabling engineers to define the best suited process and drying technology.
A matching process technology minimizes cleaning cost
To minimize the cost per cleaned part, it’s necessary that the existing cleanliness specification isn’t only reliable, but also quickly reached. The systems are equipped with various application-specific treatment technologies such as spray, high-pressure, immersion, ultrasonic and plasma cleaning, vapor decreasing, injection flood washing, deburring, pulsated pressure cleaning (PPC), and a passivation/preservation process.
By combining these cleaning procedures, the cleaning result and duration for the specific parts can be influenced in a pinpointed manner. The PPC procedure in combination with an aqueous or solvent-based immersion cleaning, reliably and quickly removes contaminations from small cavities. In case of complex and bulk parts, spray processes and injection flood washing with adjustable nozzles between 10 and 16 bar also deliver markedly improved cleaning results and shorter process times in solvent cleaning processes.
Quality and cost can be optimized by combining processes that required several machines in one single cleaning system such as chamber machines designed for solvent-based or aqueous batch cleaning with a subsequent low-pressure plasma process. This method effectively and efficiently prepares the part surface for a subsequent coating or bonding. Ecoclean‘s extensive product range also offers respective solutions for pinpointed deburring and cleaning of single parts, for example hydraulic and motor components in one system.
Dry-cleaning – selective or whole surfaces
Cleaning tasks also change along with changing manufacturing and joining technologies. The focus lies more and more on dry-cleaning processes, be it for removing film-type contaminations from joint surfaces in a pinpointed manner, cleaning electronic components and assemblies, removing powder residues from additively manufactured components or cleaning integrated in assembly. For this and many more applications, the equipment manufacturer has developed a special toolbox for cleaning processes with atmospheric pressure plasma, laser, CO2 snow, conditioned vacuum air as well as saturated and dry water vapor. Depending on the specific application, these ‘tools’ too are applied alone or combined.