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When a sound wave encounters an object or discontinuity in the sound conducting medium, at least part of the sound is reflected.  The way the sound reflects depends in large part on the rigidity of the reflecting surface.  If the object is hard, like a substantial piece of metal, the wave reflects as shown below. … Continued

Drying is almost always the longest step in a cleaning process.  Because of this, anything that will speed up the drying process is of special interest to the process engineer.  Hot air drying is, by far, the most common means of drying used in the industrial parts cleaning arena.  Major variables in hot air drying are temperature, … Continued

De-ionized water is commonly used in both industrial and precision cleaning systems, primarily for rinsing.  De-ionized water is a little like the speed of light or absolute zero in that you can never quite TOTALLY remove all the ions from the water (although we can get close) and, once a certain level of de-ionization is achieved, it … Continued

As a prolog to the following let me just say, as I may have said before in this blog, that being an engineer is both a blessing and a curse.  A blessing because you intuitively understand how things work (or at least think you do) that other people see as magic, and a curse because … Continued

Adding water to cleaning and rinsing tanks is inevitable in a cleaning process.  Most modern machines include a means to sense liquid level and add more water or other appropriate liquid as necessary.  It would seem simple enough, but there are a lot of factors to consider in managing liquid makeup. The first thing to determine is … Continued

Viscosity and surface tension are properties that are often intuitively linked to one another.  Because these properties are of primary importance in cleaning it will be worth the while to understand them a bit better. Surface tension is the property of a liquid that exists at the interface of the liquid with another media (usually … Continued

We have all heard of servos (short for servomechanism) but exactly what characterizes a “servo” is often a cloudy topic. Most sources are in agreement that the centrifugal ball governor invented by James Watt and used to control the speed of steam engines was the first application of a powered servo mechanism.  This eloquently simple … Continued

In the process of parts cleaning, capillary flow can be our friend or our enemy – sometimes both at the same time.  So let’s take a minute or two to understand this interesting phenomenon. Capillary flow is a property that is exhibited when liquids spontaneously penetrate narrow passageways.  The classic example of a capillary (narrow passageway) … Continued

One of the problems with using the number of watts consumed to produce a particular output of another form of energy (light, motion, heat, etc) is that there are always losses when one form of energy is converted to another.  Although the law of conservation of energy always applies, energy lost in conversion to other forms of … Continued

I usually try to make sure I’ve done my research prior to posting a blog.  As I was thinking about the post about the ceramic ring test, however, it occurred to me that there are a couple of variables that I had not previously considered – – the pencil and the means of applying the markings to the … Continued