What is Dry Ice Cleaning?

Cleaning with Dry Ice is Clean and Safe!

Dry ice cleaning (also known as dry ice blasting, dry ice blast cleaning, and dry ice dusting) is similar to sand blasting, plastic bead blasting, or soda blasting where a medium is accelerated in a pressurized air stream to impact a surface to be cleaned or prepared. But that's where the similarity ends.

Dry ice cleaning process

Instead of using hard abrasive media to grind on a surface (and damage it), Dry ice cleaning uses soft dry ice, accelerated at supersonic speeds, and creates mini-explosions on the surface to lift the undesirable item off the underlying substrate. If you want to read all the technical details, see the How CO2 Blasting Works page.

Dry ice cleaning has many unique and superior benefits over traditional blasting media.

Dry ice cleaning:

See how dry ice cleaning works

  • is a non-abrasive, nonflammable and nonconductive cleaning method
  • is environmentally-friendly and contains no secondary contaminants such as solvents or grit media
  • is clean and approved for use in the food industry
  • allows most items to be cleaned in place without time-consuming disassembly
  • can be used without damaging active electrical or mechanical parts or creating fire hazards
  • can be used to remove production residues, release agents, contaminants, paints, oils and biofilms
  • can be as gentle as dusting smoke damage from books or as aggressive as removing weld slag from tooling
  • can be used for many general cleaning applications

Dry ice cleaning uses compressed air to accelerate frozen carbon dioxide (CO2) "dry ice" pellets to a high velocity. A compressed air supply of 80 PSI/50 scfm can be used in this process. Dry ice pellets can be made on-site or supplied. Pellets are made from food grade carbon dioxide that has been specifically approved by the FDA, the EPA and the USDA.

Carbon dioxide (CO2)is a non-poisonous, liquefied gas, which is both inexpensive and easily stored at work sites.

Additional information