•  On Jun, 24, 2022
•  admin
•   Surface Cleaning

Everyone is looking for surface cleaning improvement in order to fulfill the latest cleanliness requirement. Especially we are moving toward a metropolitan kind of living style, people become more demanding in surface cleaning.  Regardless of the environmental cleaning, sanitizing, or even the self-hygiene.  Besides personal hygiene, the industrial product cleanliness requirements also getting more demanding.

Achieving a better surface cleanliness is everyone needs.

Today, we are going to discuss some of the basic criteria which affected the cleanliness, hope it will help you to acquire the basic knowledge so that you could apply improvement actions.

The Detergent Aspect

Detergent definitely the important factor that affects the cleaning result.  Perhaps, detergent is playing the important role in the cleaning process. You may see some of the advertisements mentioned “clean without detergent”, unfortunately, it only works for certain contaminants. So, the detergent selection becomes a decision criterion for cleaning activity.

Contaminants Categories

We have to understand the contaminant before we could select the appropriate detergent. Even though there are many type of contaminants, but let us separate into several categories:

1. Soil and dust contaminant. Loose dust or soil type of contaminant is the most common type of contaminant we are facing every day. This is due to the dust is accumulated at a specific location over a period of time. The cleaning strategy for removing the soil and dust type of contaminant is very straightforward, just dislodged the contaminant from the substrate surface.
2. Oil smear and residue. In some of the engineering articles, some may name this contaminant as a hydrocarbon contaminant, but over here we named it as oil smear which more intuitive. Household kitchen or many industrial is facing oil smear contaminants. For instance, the vacuum hood is always deposited with a thick layer of oil smear. The oil smear will turn into a stubborn aged-oil stain which most of the detergent is unable to remove effectively. We had developed a Kitchen Spray Cleaner targeted for removing kitchen oil stain mark.
3. Chemical residue. This is a very specialized topic of chemical contaminants. Only professional and well-trained people could handle the chemical remover. The basic fundamental is solution neutralization. We have to perform pH neutralization before we could go for remover. We will discuss some of the detail in another section.
4. Microbial contaminant. This is referring to the harmful viruses and bacteria which we have to remove especially from the food. For the microbial contaminant, we always refer to sanitize as we want to kill the microorganism instead of removing it.

Cleaning Strategy

So far you have understood several types of contaminants which we are facing either in our living environment or workspace. Let see what’s cleaning strategy we could adopt.

1. Mechanical Force. The purpose of scrubbing is to increase the mechanical force for removing the contaminants. This is a common step for removing dust and soil types of contaminants. One of the main challenges is avoiding causing surface scratches during the cleaning process.
2. Neutralization and Dilution. Most of the time, we are putting solution neutralization and follow-up with dilution for removing the chemical spill-off.
3. Surface Wetting Ability. The detergent comes with wetting ability and this effect will help to dislodge the contaminant from the substrate surface. A lower surface tension solution will have a better wetting ability, but that doesn’t mean we have to select the lowest surface tension solution for our detergent.
4. Sanitize. For some circumstances, our objective is to kill bacteria and viruses. Under this condition, we could select sanitize. For instance, during the COVID pandemic, people advise carrying a hand sanitizer to ensure personal hygiene.
5. Emulsion. The detergent acts as an emulsifier to combine the water and oil molecule. Water itself cannot take away the oil contaminant. But a detergent that comes in bi-polar nature will bond the oil molecule and form a micelle. And the micelle will be flushed away by the water.

The Sponge for improving Scrubbing Effect

Even though a proper detergent selection is predominating the cleaning result but in certain occasion, we could enhance the cleaning result. In most cases, we will introduce scrubbing action. A scrubbing is something like we scrubbing our hands. In industrial cleaning, we will use a sponge material.

PVA sponge is the most common scrubbing material in the cleaning process. Field engineer will experience a significant surface cleaning improvement after introducing a scrubbing process.

The Cleaning Setup

Now you have selected a suitable detergent and also applying PVA sponge for surface scrubbing. This doesn’t ensure you will obtain the best surface cleaning result. The contaminant parts has to go through a proper cleaning process.

You need to select the appropriate detergent and process setup in order to achieve a cleaned surface.

A good surface cleaning result could be improved by setting up a proper cleaning sequence. This is where the experience becomes important. Sometime with a minor tweak on a cleaning process, the result is marvelous. In case you come across a cleaning challenge, or looking for a surface cleaning improvement, feel free to contact DST and we are happy to work with you.