Browse Client Types

Browse past lab clients by general industry sectors

Trial Number 6

Trial Purpose:

7th contaminant cleaning

Date Run:

04/11/2002

Experiment Procedure:

Thirteen preweighed coupons were coated with a parrafin wax, by heating the wax with a Master Appliance heat gun and rubbing the coupons with the hot wax. Once cooled, coupons were reweighed. Five coupons were clipped to wire racks and immersed into the Flow-Matic machine and cleaned for 1 minutes using ultrasonics at 92 F, removed and rinsed in a tap water spray and re-immersed into the ultrasonics for an additional 1 minute followed by a second 5 second rinse. The coupons were then dried using an air knife for 15 seconds. A second set of five coupons followed the same cleaning cycle except they were hung on a wire stand and immersed into a Crest 40 kHz ultrasonic tank. The final three coupons were cleaned in water using stir-bar agitation, rinsed with the spray and dried with air knives.

Trial Results:

Comparison of the two processes revealed that both system were ineffective at removing the wax from the stainless steel coupons.
Table 1. Cleaning Efficiencies

Process Flow-Matic Traditional
  -0.28 0.00
  -0.21 0.42
  2.46 0.16
  -0.94 0.68
  -0.96 0.04
Average 0.01 0.26
Std Dev 1.41 0.29

Water in the immersion cleaning removed about the same amount of wax as the ultrasonic systems.
Wax
-0.32
-0.42
-0.14
-0.30
0.14

Success Rating:

A follow up test, usually based on company input.

Conclusion:

Neither system was effective in cleaning the wax.

Save Report as a PDF