Kerry cleans up extrusion dies

Guyson International has installed a Kerry Ultrasonic UCR (Ultrasonic Clean and Rinse) machine, for cleaning extrusion dies, at Eurocell Profiles.

Eurocell found that they regularly needed to clean their dies, of plateout (gas fumes from PVC extrusion process) and other residue to maintain a clean profile for accurate extrusions and prolong their working life.

Due to the precise nature of these dies, any prospective cleaning process must be able to clean without any fear of introducing dimensional change or wear to the critical profiles.

As many of these dies are in daily use, there is no time to move them off site or have them unproductive for long periods, so an in-house solution was required.

Guyson proposed a Kerry Ultrasonic UCR system.

Trials were undertaken to determine the most effective transducer frequency and then a special heavy duty 25kHz ultrasonic twin-tank wash and rinse system was designed and manufactured.

Smaller dies are loaded into a stainless steel basket and placed on the heavy duty base support grid on the bottom of the 800mm wide tank.

The larger multi-segment dies (up to 190kg) are lowered by hoist onto the reinforced grid inside stage one's lidded 144-litre tank, where they are cleaned in a hot caustic cleaning solution with the low frequency of 25kHz sonics.

The tank is fitted with two submersible transducers, to deliver the sonics, mounted to the front and rear side walls of the tank.

A temperature indicator and process timer are also fitted.

The dies are then moved into stage two's lidded tank, where they are submerged and thoroughly rinsed clean in town water.

Stage two has a flexible spray wand to clean the dies of any residuals and the tank is fitted with a weir to drain.

Eurocell's production manager Ian Toplis said that with the Kerry Ultrasonic system they could clean six moulds in the time that their old cleaner took to clean one.

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