Deep cleaning with carbon dioxide

The Fraunhofer Cleaning Technology Alliance (FAR), which has eight Fraunhofer institutes as its members, has unveiled a tool that combines, in one step, cleaning with super-critical carbon dioxide and cleaning with CO2 snow.

In server components, hard disks, or clock mechanisms, the smallest impurities lead to malfunctions and short circuits; in optical components such as lenses, they impair quality because they scatter light; in threaded holes, they cause mechanical failure.

The phenomena of progressive miniaturisation and ever more complex components are presenting the manufacturers of cleaning technologies and tools with big challenges.

However, cleaning with carbon dioxide (CO2) has proven itself an effective means of removing extremely fine dirt particles.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA displayed a tool capable of completely removing processing residues from areas inside components that are difficult to clean, for example blind holes and boreholes.

The tool was developed in the DeepClean collaborative project, where IPA researchers successfully combined different CO2 cleaning techniques in a single cleaning step: degreasing with supercritical CO2 and removing particles with CO2 snow crystals.