Dry ice rays
Dry ice rays are applied to:
- Removing pollution without affecting the floor;
- Removing chewing gum from decorative stone surfaces.
Advantages of dry ice rays:
- Environmental friendly (carbon dioxide is the main ingredient of our atmosphere, a so-called closed balance);
- Dry (carbon dioxide gas has no liquid form);
- Can be applied to many polluted surfaces (no attack on the surface, eg metal, coating layers, etc.);
- Not machine-bound, we work with a separate nozzle.
The possibilities of dry ice blasting are well expressed in the following article.
‘An estimated 250,000 to 300,000 pieces of chewing gum until recently marred the platforms of The Hague Central Station. Nieuwenhuis was busy for eight days to remove all spots by means of dry ice blasting. To do this, the company used up to -80 ºC cooled carbon dioxide, which is blasted with a very high speed (about a thousand kilometers per hour!) By a kind of pistol on the front tiles.
Each piece of chewing gum thus suffers a hail rain of thirty grains per second. The granules penetrates deep into the chewing gum, which therefore cools down considerably. In this collision, friction heat is generated, as a result of which the temperature of the grains rises by about two degrees. The carbonic acid granules then sublimate from a solid form to carbon dioxide gas in one go. This transformation is accompanied by a volume increase of five to seven hundred times. The result: the chewing gum bursts apart.
