Remanufacturing Cleaning of Aluminum

What if the parts we are trying to clean consist of more than aluminum? Does this change our process?
It can change your process. What we want to evaluate is the metals and where the most contamination is along with what the percentage of each of those metals are. We may stick with the aluminum process, we may do a multi-chemical process. We really just need to take those individually and your local KYZEN rep will be happy to discuss that. We may want to run tests in the lab to make sure we have the right combination of chemistry in the machine.

What makes cleaning the burned-on carbon off of aluminum tougher than steel?
For steel we are able to use higher alkaline chemistry and if we do that on aluminum, we are just going to add to the material. That’s why we have specific chemistries for specific materials because just the way the chemistry reacts to the material can be different. That’s why we want to make sure to specify the material and chemistry combination.

In comparison to the traditional cleaning methods, what is the savings in process time?
What we’ve seen in the past is customers were historically spending 30-40 minutes per cycle but now we are seeing 15-20 minutes of cycle time. Some other things customers have liked about the implementation of this is the bath life historically lasted about 10 days and now they are seeing 20 days on the average for the bath life which is really great. The chemistry is going much longer than it used to. The other part with the bead blasting we’re historically seeing a reduction of manual labor about 80%. So all the time people are spending doing that manually now takes 20% of time it used to.

Do you have any suggestions for machine companies that can help with this application?
We’re really lucky. As a company, we have a lot of great companies we work with in terms of machine manufacturing. We have relationships with most of the industry leaders, and there is not one that works for everybody. What would be good is to have a conversation and kind of explain what you’re looking for and then we can essentially match maker you with a couple of machine companies and let them run because that’s really their area and expertise. There is definitely a number of them out there that would be happy to match with.