Enertia
Centrifugal Immersion CO2 Cleaning Systems
Many manufacturing processes require oils and lubes. Add dust, chips and other types of contamination and you’ve got parts, substrates and assemblies that must be cleaned. But getting surfaces precision clean is tough when regulations strictly control or even outlaw your solvent choices or if the surfaces are inaccessible or tightly spaced. Sure, you’ve tried all sorts of water-based soaps, detergents and costly aqueous solvent cleaners, but now you need antifoam agents and skimmers, not to mention a virtual river of rinse water. Then you spend time and money blowing or baking them dry. Employing volatile organic solvents introduces a different, but just as constraining set of issues such as worker exposure, flammability, and high cost of ownership. Now you have a better option.
Liquid carbon dioxide is a pure, clean solvent that takes many films and oils into solution. Its’ near-zero viscosity penetrates the smallest crevices bringing cleaning power where it’s needed most. With our patented centrifugal shear process, contamination is rapidly stripped away. After a quick rinse with freshly distilled liquid CO2, your dry parts are ready to ship. CO2 cleaning requires no special permits even from the tough SCAQMD or EPA because it’s non-toxic, non-flammable and environmentally neutral. On-board CO2 distillation recycles nearly 100% while separating full concentration oils for reuse after filtering out solids.
When appropriate, high-boiling environmentally-friendly additives can be used as co-solvents, which are also recycled. Moreover any “Industry Approved” or “Mil-Spec” cleaning solvent may be used with the Enertia system as a new more powerful “carbonated” prewash agent, providing numerous novel and dry solvent wash-CO2 rinse precision cleaning combinations in a closed cell. This allows you to continue using your “spec’d in” cleaning solvent chemistries in a safer and more effective cleaning process. Finally, our BlueFire® plasma process may be integrated into the Enertia to further extend your processing capability - providing ultra-clean, micro-etch and disinfection capability.
Example Applications and Benefits
- Precision cleaning and oil recovery from complex and miniature machined components
- Extraction of outgas contamination from functional fibers and polymers at a fraction of the time required or thermal vacuum bake-out or Soxhlet extraction
- Defluxing and underfill plasma treatment under very low-tolerance flip-chip packages
- Scouring medical textiles to remove processing oils and to destroy biological and proteinaceous contaminants
