Printing presses are large, complicated machines with numerous moving parts, requiring careful maintenance. They contain ink and often thousands of tiny shards of paper. Fortunately, dry ice blasting offers an excellent cleaning method to maintain these systems with little or no downtime and powerful results.
How Dry Ice Blasting Works
As always, we start with the basics of how dry ice blasting works. The process uses high-pressure compressed air to power a blast machine that meters precise amounts of 3mm dry ice pellets through a nozzle and directs the stream at the object being cleaned. The cleaning results from three primary effects:
- Kinetic Energy: The physical impact of the dry ice pellets striking the surface blasts away dirt, ink, loose paint, oils, grease, and other surface contaminants.
- Thermal Effect: The super-cold dry ice (at -109° Fahrenheit) rapidly changes the temperature of both the surface and the contaminants. This extreme temperature differential releases the surface tension between the materials, significantly increasing cleaning power.
- Sublimation: When the pellets strike the surface, they instantly convert back to a gas (sublimation). This rapid phase change releases the energy stored during the creation of the solid pellets, creating an “explosion” that acts as a force multiplier. This force gets underneath the contaminants, helping to break the bond between the printing equipment and the dried ink, paper dust, machine oils, and grease.
Benefits of Dry Ice Blasting
Because dry ice blasting is non-abrasive, it does not damage the printing equipment. It can be used around production runs without requiring equipment disassembly or disconnection from power sources. This saves time and money through higher production efficiency, lower labor costs for maintenance, and reduced idle time.
The process uses no solvents or chemicals, eliminating the need for rags or towels disposal, and it minimizes the manual hand cleaning that employees dislike.
Applications
Dry ice blasting is suitable for any equipment that uses ink, including offset presses, gravure, lithography, flexography, and others. It quickly removes dried ink, grease,loose paper and paper dust, and oils. It effectively cleans rollers, motors, feeders, belts, ink trays, gears, vents and supports, control boxes, and catwalks.
We have extensive experience in cleaning various operations, from black and white printers to six-color systems, and from small equipment to printing lines with dozens of stations running hundreds of feet long.
Companies can benefit from dry ice blast cleaning by achieving faster, better cleaning with shorter downtime, getting equipment back into production more quickly, and producing product for customers sooner.
