The Fluidized Sand Bed And Metal Cleaning Applications
Schaus-Vorhies Kleaning (SVK) is focused on providing you with the cleaning services available. Whether you are sending us tools and machinery to refurbish, sending them from a third party manufacturer, or coming over from Schaus-Vorhies Manufacturing (SVM), we want to provide you with a product that is entirely free of any impurities. After all, the slightest contamination, whether it be paint, grease, or a chemical leftover from the manufacturing process, can affect sensitive systems. Systems involved in chemical production or cooling systems for nuclear power plants are carefully monitored and maintained within very tight tolerances regarding chemical concentrations, minimizing the corrosion of the systems. Enter fluidized sand bed cleaning.
We offer our fluidized sand bed cleaning. The heated sand moves around the components to be cleaned, gently removing all the impurities without doing damage to the component itself. What are some of the components that are suitable for cleaning in our large volume sand baskets? Let’s take a look at some of them and why you might send them to us for cleaning.
Metal Castings: Many casted parts today have intricate passageways which are difficult to clean properly. Metal casting technologies have evolved enough so that many sophisticated designs can now be cast rather than fabricated. Fluidized sand bed cleaning can be a very effective method for cleaning parts that otherwise could not be cleaned thoroughly be traditional blasting type methods.
Screws and bolts: Even brand new screws and bolts can have impurities from the manufacturing process. Most of these won’t necessarily come in contact with the fluid in even sensitive systems. However, there are still specific environments where it is better to take no more chances than necessary. What makes fluidized sand bed cleaning the best option for cleaning screws and bolts is their threads. Even with large screws with coarse threads, it is hard to get in between them with most cleaning methods. By immersing bolts and screws in the fluidized sand bed, they are surrounded by the cleaning medium. The sand moves around the materials, getting down into the bottom of even the finest threads, and cleaning them more thoroughly than any other method.
Valves: By their nature, valves have many internal surfaces that are difficult to reach, if not impossible. It is essential to ensure these are cleaned if the valves are removed from a system and refurbished for future use. This is true even if they were in a tightly controlled system. There is simply no such thing as a perfectly clean system. Therefore, some corrosion products will build up. Suppose they aren’t cleaned as part of the refurbishing process. In that case, those corrosion products can release into the new system once they experience their first thermal or hydraulic shock. The fluidized sand bed can get into all internal passageways, resulting in perfectly clean and ready to be used valve bodies and seats.
Pumps: Like valves, pumps have various internal surfaces that are somewhere between difficult and impossible to clean properly with most methods. It is even more critical to make sure a pump is clean before putting it into a system, again, especially if it is being refurbished. Internal seals can become degraded, introducing oil and grease into the system and coating the pump’s internals. Merely replacing the seals making sure all the physical tolerances are in the spec will wind up being a waste of time if the mess from years of prior operation isn’t cleaned up in our fluidized sand bed.
Grease traps: Grease traps are perfect candidates for the fluidized sand bed cleaning that SVK offers. Anyone who has worked in a kitchen or a garage knows how difficult grease is to clean. Now imagine that same difficulty but in a component designed to collect it. Cleaning through any conventional means would be time-consuming and challenging, and that’s assuming you can get at all of the grease-covered internal surfaces. Since the chances are very slim indeed, getting in all the nooks and crannies by hand would be impossible. We offer our fluidized sand bed cleaning for precisely this kind of situation. Immerse the grease trap in the bed and wait as the heated sand moves around and removes all the grease from the trap, making it ready to be installed in the same system as before or a brand new one. In either case, you will be left with a component that is restored to as good as new condition.
Regardless of the particular component or application, SVK’s fluidized sand bed cleaning process is perfect if the goal is to ensure that as few impurities as possible are present. After a trip to the sand bed process, the components can be power washed with demineralized water to remove any lingering ash. Finally, the component can be placed in service, and the system restored, all with the confidence that you won’t be placing any unwanted impurities in your systems.
