Cleaning commercial printing equipment with dry ice blasting is a high-tech approach. Many have realised that CO2 cleaning systems are the instrument of choice whether it comes to cleaning a web press on the manufacturing floor, blasting a glue pot off line, or removing adhesive.
Cleaning production printing equipment is simple using dry ice blasting. Jobs that used to take a week or more to complete can now be completed in a matter of days or hours. The length of time it takes to clean each piece of equipment varies depending on a number of factors:
The thickness of the pollutant being removed, as well as the sort of contaminant being eliminated (hard, dry ink or semi wet)
The smoothness of the blasted surfaces (a more porous surface tends to clean a little slower)
Experience as a driver
Knowledge of the cleaning equipment
Compressed air quality and quantity (It’s best to use 100 psi and 300 cfm of clean, dry air.)
Those in the printing and packaging sector are all too familiar with the old, manual cleaning methods of donning protective gear and spending hours scraping, raging, and scrubbing hard-to-reach regions with solvents. Dry ice blasting is a more efficient and user-friendly “point and shoot” cleaning procedure. These devices employ pressurised air to propel high-speed solid CO2 particles through a blast cannon. When these particles collide, they sublimate, causing a “gas flushing” process that dislodges and removes the pollutants, resulting in a single waste stream with little secondary waste.
When used as part of a preventative maintenance programme, dry ice cleaning can help to reduce downtime, costly repairs, and poor product quality.
