Dry Ice Blasting.....

[john111]

Hi everyone. I am an engineering student. I read something called dry ice blasting and hazardous waste disposal while browsing net. Well I don’t know why, but I am curious to know about it. I know about traditional labor intensive methods like scrapers, wire brushes, sand blasting and pressure washing. I know dry ice is basically solid form of CO2, but I have no clue about this dry ice blasting and industrial cleaning .
Can somebody throw some light on this or at least suggest some site where I can find some info on this.

Sam.

[themightytimmah]

I'm not an expert, but IIRC dry ice blasting offers the same advantages as most other kind of media blasting (like sand or bead blasting), without having to clean up the media (since it evaporates). It'd probably be good for outdoor work - taking rust off an oil rig, for example.

[Setec Astronomy]

Timmah, you're missing the point--who cares if you're sand blasting an oil rig and you get sand on the ground or in the ocean? The dry ice blasting was developed for removing paint from airplanes; in that case, the paint residue (which includes zinc chromate primer and similar heavy-metal containing corrosion-inhibiting primers) is easily separated from the blast media (as you noted) reducing the volume of hazardous waste and simplifying the treatment of said waste. It also can be less agressive on the substrate.

I guess it also replaces chemical paint removal which requires a lot of solvents as noted in this article (the pdf is acting all screwy so I'm linking a poorly formatted HTML version) EPA-17 Success Stories

[ramtough]

Use it to get rid of mildew in houses.

[Civicman86]

Interesting. I just use it to get the sound deadening material out of cars.

[smprince1]

Here's a few links with more info on the subject:

Dry Ice Blasting Overview

Dry ice - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

PACE Dry Ice Cleaning

[the other pc]

to Autopia, john111!

One particularly cool (sorry, no pun intended) use for it is cleaning swarf/resin buildup off of industrial wide-belt sanders, while the machines are operating. Efficient cleaning with no down time gives higher productivity and better belt life with no hazardous residue.


PC.

[mhadden]

Dry ice blasting does wonders IMO. My father, recently contracted a company to come in and clean a building that they were taking over that was used for machining for Delphi. They came in and dry-iced everything and it made most of the stuff look like new! It especially got ride of a lot of the grit and grime where you wouldn't normally be able to reach without tearing stuff apart. The only bad thing was it left the grit on the floor, but it was easily cleaned up with a floor scrubber/cleaner. If I had a dirty job that I wanted cleaned and to look good, I would probably contract someone to use this method. It appears to work well.