Dry ice cleaning

Instead of using hard abrasives to strip a surface, dry ice blasting uses soft dry ice, accelerated to supersonic speed, and creates mini-blasts on the surface to lift the unwanted element out of the underlying substrate.

Dry ice blasting has significant advantages on two levels:
- Not only by impact but also by the abrupt cooling by CO2 (-78°C), the upper layer to be treated contracts and comes off easily.
- Moreover, the CO2 used by this process is eliminated without any treatment operation, by simply returning to a gaseous state (the beads sublime in the air after blasting).

The principle of dry ice cleaning is comparable to other blasting techniques such as sandblasting or high-pressure cleaning but uses cooled solid CO2 beads. On impact, the beads sublimate, increasing their volume by a factor of 700. This process causes the contaminated layers to freeze, shrink, weaken and detach from the surface.

Most of the equipment can be cleaned on site without dismantling, without waiting for it to cool down. Here are the operational advantages of this process:
- Improve the quality of production.
- Avoid health and safety issues from toxic solvents and thus provide a healthier working environment.
- Reduce cleaning times, production costs, preventive maintenance, equipment repair costs and production interruptions.
- Avoid humidity. Eliminate secondary waste and the cost of disposal.
- Extend equipment life by minimizing surface abrasion.
- It is a non-abrasive, non-flammable and non-conductive cleaning process.
- It is environmentally friendly and free of secondary contaminants such as solvents or gravel.
- It is clean and approved for use in the food industry.
- Allows most items to be cleaned on site, with no time lost for disassembly.
- Can be used without damaging active, electrical or mechanical parts or creating fire hazards.
- Can be used to remove production residues, release agents, contaminants, paint, oil and biofilm.