Cleaning Carbon Tool Steel
Q. How to clean mild tool steel tablet press punches and dies?
A. Mild tool steel, sometimes called S7, will flash rush during rinsing, particularly if you rinse with hot water. All the cleaners that have good chelating agents (all but Luminox and Detergent 8) can safely clean tool steel because the chelating agents tie up the iron oxide and do not let it auto-catalytically expand and form rust.
Reducing Foam in Ultrasonic Cleaning
How do we go about reducing foam suds in our 1% Liquinox ultrasonic bath? We have 3 ultrasonic tanks in our series process. Bath 1 has the 1% solution. Bath 2 and 3 are a rinsing cascade system with RO water only. The foam is building up in tank 1 and then transfers to tank 2.
Alconox, Inc. at IMTS 2018
Visit Alconox, Inc. at IMTS, at McCormick Place in Chicago, September 10-15, 2018. Stop by East Building, Level 2, Booth #121340 to receive our unique gifts, expert technical support for your critical cleaning applications, and detergent samples.
Our critical cleaning detergents are excellent in meeting the varying needs of the precision machining industry. Whether it’s ultrasonic cleaning of parts and tools, stainless steel passivation, aerospace manufacturing, or unclogging abrasive media in grinding or waterjet machining, we’ve got you covered.
Choosing Ideal Detergent for Cleaning Metal Parts
Q. We are currently writing a protocol for conducting a process validation activity for our cleaning procedures for metal parts after our machining manufacturing process. What are the differences between cleaning effectiveness of Alconox detergent for cleaning various metallic surfaces such as stainless steel, titanium and cobalt chrome? Also, does Alconox detergent effectiveness change based on contamination characteristics, surface geometry or any other factors?
Brix vs. Conductivity: Measuring Ultrasonic Bath Concentration
Several years ago, our plant was directed to use the Refractive Index as a method of letting us monitor bath concentration during ultrasonic cleaning with your Liquinox detergent. More recently, our factory in Asia switched to Liquinox and were directed to use a conductivity measurement to monitor concentration. I decided to measure our cleaning bath using both methods and found a discrepancy — the brix (Refractive Index) reading was slightly above 1% concentration, but the Conductivity reading was nearly 2% concentration.