Ultrasonic Cleaning Technology Will Greatly Extend The Service Life Of Injection Mold

PAM injection moulds provide a wide range of products for the automotive, home, lawn and garden markets. In an interview with PlasticsToday, PAM injection molding mold manager RogerWheeler said, "to make these different parts, many of our molds have interchangeable modules. So we can take the modules out and put them in a tank to thoroughly clean the sediment and gas between the modules.

According to RogerWheeler, the biggest benefit of using ultrasonic cleaning is the time savings. "Cleaning molds by hand is time-consuming and some areas are difficult to clean," he said. To be honest, manual cleaning is not possible because, no matter how careful you are, we cannot thoroughly clean those moulds with complex shapes. We took a biodegradable, water-soluble liquid and put it in the crevices to loosen up those sediments and gases, which made my job a lot easier. If it's a manual cleaning task that takes hours, it can be done in 30 minutes with an ultrasound machine.

Using ultrasonic cleaning also allows mold technicians to multitask, RogerWheeler added. "even though some of the mold parts are in the ultrasonic tank, they can make time to clean the base of the mold, which allows them to work more efficiently and produce higher quality parts."

PAM injection molding USES the elmasonicx-trabasic550 industrial ultrasonic cleaning machine with a 15-gallon storage tank. "We often get our molds from other molds, but we find that they are in poor condition," RogerWheeler said. So we took them apart and cleaned them thoroughly and then put them in the press to make sure we got high-quality parts.

Ultrasonic cleaning produces a cavitation phenomenon -- the implosion of billions of microscopic bubbles -- that submerges into the surface of the cleaning solution. The bubbles are generated by a dynamo-driven transducer attached to the bottom of the stainless steel tank.

When excited, the transducer vibrates at ultrasonic frequencies in excess of kilohertz (kHz) per second. This causes the bottom of the tank to act as a membrane for the bubbles.