Mobile Precision Cleaning Tools

When production support fixtures such as tool blocks are contaminated, parts don’t transfer properly. When molds get dirty, surface finish suffers. But when you tear them apart to bring into the maintenance shop for cleaning, you may spend more time realigning than cleaning. So you push the timeline, hoping you’ll get another batch finished before something jams. Solvent spray cleaners once were cheap and easy, but environmental regulations and worker safety concerns now rule those out…especially inside cleanrooms. With MobileClean™, you bring precision cleaning exactly where it’s needed.

Precision CO2 Cleaning Workstations

Cleaning delicate and sensitive parts demands a controlled environment. Dust and particles abound in the air; plus moisture makes it difficult too. Sure, you can carry your parts down to a cleanroom and try to get some lab space to run a few tests. Maybe they will let you bring your cleaning system inside. But how can you see when you’re doing an effective job of cleaning?

Flexible Automated and CO2-enabled Workcells

The SnoBot™ custom robotic cleaning series can handle substrates or fixtures up to 24 inches square, providing cleaning and surface modification like never before. Within the interlocked and exhausted enclosure, parts are thoroughly scrubbed with a CO2 composite spray to remove gross surface contamination. Momentum transfer blasts particles away while the instantaneous solvent power of liquid CO2 quickly removes thin film contamination. An optional powerful jet of BlueFire™ atmospheric plasma technology breaks the bonds of tough organics like a jackhammer with a microscopic combination of UV light, ozone, oxygen radicals and heat. A final pass with CO2 composite spray removes the remaining debris away, leaving a clean and high energy surface for bonding, coating, encapsulation, or underfill processes (which themselves can be incorporated into the SnoBot as well). Test results prove surfaces are prepared as good as or better than using etchants and dangerous solvents and without costly and time-consuming multiple processing stations. Your parts are ready for wire bonding, gluing, imprinting, assembly or other secondary operations where particle and residue cleanliness or increased surface energy improves operations.

Example Applications and Benefits

• Selective submicron particle removal from hard disk drive assemblies during precision assembly
• Create lean and green assembly cells – for example an adhesive bonding cell that provides dry selective CO2 composite spray surface cleaning, followed by a CO2 atmospheric plasma etch, and completed by a selective adhesive dispense and UV cure operation
• Cleaning with non-contact surface inspection

Automated CO2 Spray Cleaning Systems

The CleanFlex™ automated spray cleaning system is an extremely economical and flexible robotic precision cleaning solution. Proven in critical applications, its cost-per-clean and absolute consistency are unmatched. Built-in CPU™ CO2 composite spray modules purify, condense and store ultraclean liquid CO2 from a source of low cost bulk CO2 gas. Since it employs a single-use cleaning agent, you’ll never get drag-out from previous parts. Every recipe uses virgin material so the results are exactly the same, month after month. And unlike conventional cleaning processes and methods, the CleanFlex does not generate cleaning agent residuals as its CO2 composite cleaning spray completely vaporizes during application.