In many in­dus­tri­al and com­mer­cial areas, pro­duc­tion-, main­te­nance- and re­pair­ing plants as well as cer­tain parts of build­ings must be cleaned at reg­u­lar in­ter­vals due to high amounts of dirt com­ing up. This is a pre-con­di­tion for the guar­an­tee of safe­ty and prod­uct qual­i­ty.

Cur­rent­ly aque­ous clean­ing pro­cess­es (e.g. high-pres­sure sys­tems) are often used. These meth­ods lead to high amounts of waste water which have to be treat­ed ex­pen­sive­ly due to the high con­cen­tra­tions of haz­ardous sub­stances. Waste water free clean­ing pro­ce­dures are there­fore a pos­si­ble so­lu­tion. An ex­am­ple of such a pro­cess is clean­ing by dry-ice-blast­ing with CO2-pel­lets, which, how­ev­er, is very cost­ly. By con­trast, the clean­ing with CO2-snow gen­er­at­ed from liq­uid CO2 is much cheap­er in prin­ci­ple. This tech­nique, how­ev­er, has not yet been ap­plied for the clean­ing of hard sur­faces in in­dus­tri­al and com­mer­cial areas. The aim of the pro­ject was the de­vel­op­ment of an eco­nom­i­cal, gen­tle and waste water free clean­ing pro­cess with high clean­ing ef­fi­cien­cy.

We thank the Ar­beits­ge­mein­schaft in­dus­trieller Forschungvere­ini­gun­gen “Otto von Gu­er­icke” e.V. (AiF) (As­so­ci­a­tion of In­dus­tri­al Re­search Or­gan­i­sa­tions) (AiF-No. 13464 N) for fund­ing these pro­jects through a fi­nan­cial sup­port by the Fed­er­al Min­istry of Eco­nom­ic Af­fairs.

Fur­ther­more we would like to thank dif­fer­ent mem­ber com­pa­nies for sup­port­ing the in­ves­ti­ga­tions.

The re­search re­port is avail­able on re­quest from FRT.