Why use dry ice blasting to remove burrs from plastic products?

Dry ice blasting is an economical cleaning technology that improves product quality and reduces scrap, cleaning costs, and downtime. It also reduces mold and tool wear. Dry ice blasting is suitable for deburring injection molding, extrusion or blow molding, and any other molded products.

Dry ice blasting
dry ice blasting

Main applications of dry ice blasting in the plastic molding industry

Dry ice blasting fully meets the various requirements for cleaning applications in the plastics industry. Dry ice cleaning machines are designed to gently and safely clean residue and contaminants from molds without interacting with the surface.

Dry ice does not penetrate sensitive equipment and leaves no residue. Dry ice blasting can be used for surface preparation of plastic products, abrasive kit cleaning, demolding, and deburring molded parts.

Disadvantages of traditional deburring methods for plastic products

Plastic parts are molded parts made of thermoplastic elastomers or thermoplastic materials, and most of the burrs occur on the parting surface. That is, between the moving mold and the static mold, the slide of the slide with parts, inserts of the gap, the top bar aperture, etc. into the melt, the formation of excess fretting burrs on the parts. These burrs are often concentrated in the plastic parts of the right angle, groove, outer circle, inner hole, intersection hole, countersunk hole.

Generally, the purely manual deburring process will cause more or less plastic parts on the surface bruises, scratches, or residues. And it will cost the enterprise a lot of financial resources and manpower, the effect is not ideal.

Because of the characteristics of plastic, the use of large-scale mechanical deburring means is difficult to implement. At the same time, the chemical method of deburring is not advocated for plastic parts, because it will cause chemical reactions, damage, or corrosion of plastic parts.

In the mass production of plastic products, reasonable surface treatment methods, so that the smoothness of the surface of the plastic parts can meet the technical specifications, and improve product quality and efficiency.

Advantages of using dry ice cleaning to deburr plastic products

Dry ice cleaning deburring for the solution of plastic products in the production process is difficult to avoid the generation of post-finishing burr phenomenon, has excellent performance.

Dry ice blasting is the use of dry ice pellets in the high-pressure airflow to accelerate the impact to remove the plastic parts of the product burr. Dry ice is instantly vaporized in the process, without producing any secondary waste, leaving only the dirt that needs to be cleaned up.

The biggest feature of dry ice cleaning deburring is non-contact and no residue, in the most natural state of plastic parts, can be completed deburring work.

Dry ice blasting can quickly and efficiently remove burrs hidden in the grooves of plastic parts, external round, internal holes, cross holes, countersunk holes. It can also be used directly with the injection molding robot to pick up the parts when the direct fixed-point deburring.

Dry ice cleaning can minimize any appearance and structural defects on the product. Very suitable for PEEK, PBT, acetal, nylon, LCP, PP, ABS, UHMWPE, nickel-titanium alloy, acrylic, phenol, and other parts on the flying edge and burr cleaning, can greatly reduce labor costs, shorten the processing cycle, improve product yield.