What is dry ice cleaning?
Cleaning with Airgas Dry Ice is an effective and safe. Dry ice cleaning (also known as dry ice blasting, dry ice blast cleaning and dry ice dusting) is similar to sand blasting, plastic bead blasting or soda blasting, where a medium is accelerated in a pressurized air stream to impact a surface to be cleaned or prepared. But that's where the similarity ends.
Instead of using hard, abrasive media to grind on a surface (and damage it), dry ice cleaning uses soft dry ice, accelerated at supersonic speeds, to create mini-explosions on the surface that lift the undesirable item off the underlying substrate. Better still, there’s no abrasive media to clean up. The dry ice simply sublimates/evaporates.
Top 10 reasons dry ice blasting is superior
- Superior clean: fewer cleaning cycles = less downtime
- Machines can be cleaned in place: dry ice blasting is a dry process and requires no disassembly/reassembly, which means much less downtime
- Quicker clean: fewer resource = more runtime = more profits
- Nonabrasive, nonflammable and nonconductive: dry ice blasting won't damage most substrates and can be used safely on electrical components
- No secondary waste cleanup: this not only saves additional cleanup labor and expense, but also means temporary containment areas can possibly be reused—an additional cost savings
- Can get into tight spaces that many other methods cannot
- Environmentally friendly: meets USDA, FDA and EPA guidelines
- Operator safety: no exposure to chemicals or grit media
- Operator efficiency: not as labor intensive as traditional cleaning methods
- Clean enough for the food industry, strong enough for everything else
