What is Digg?34 Comments
- SkeletaLlama, on 10/12/2007, -0/+18Can they put it in a Roomba to clean my floors? Because it would be awesome to have a robot zooming around my house spewing out dry ice particles and fog.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11Sir, you get my vote for stupidest comment of the week.
- spling, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10.... CO_2 is environmentally friendly. What do you think plants use to make oxygen?
Carbon dioxide != Carbon monoxide - arkitect, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7So your dick is frozen to a temperature lower that solid CO2 and must remain at said temperature or else it will fall off? Cause thats the only way it would thaw in a bath of dry ice.
- DWatch, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6The big problem with sand is the clean-up afterwords. If you are working on anything too large to be picked up and put into a booth of some sort, it becomes pretty nasty to deal with the aftermath. Add to that, the silica can become an airborne dust, which is like tiny pieces of jagged glass, that can harm your lungs when inhaled. Its called silicosis, I think.
- Genthree, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7I say we bring out the liquid Nitrogen. Can you say frostbite in July?
- hello2usir, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Don't quit your day jobs.
- qxcvz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Gotta love sublimation.
- spling, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4You should probably also see this nice quote from TFA.
"Another appealing aspect is that the leftovers dissipate into the air, leaving no messy cleanup and making the process environmentally friendly." - addisonj, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Wow brilliant! sandblasting leaves such a mess afterwards, you could do this in the middle of your house on top of a tarp or something (to catch whatever your blasting off) and otther than that debris, everything else would just sublimate but not without a really cool fog show
- DWatch, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3This isn't "more" CO2, its existing CO2 in the air that was captured and frozen. When it thaws, the net effect to the atmosphere will be zero increase in CO2, except maybe for the fuel used to capture and freeze the gas in the first place (assuming it wasn't nuclear or hydro sourced).
- Nohbudy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3As long as the CO2 is pulled from the air, not pulled from underground we are good. It is the fact that we pull up old CO2 from many thousands of years ago out of the ground, instead of useing current readly availble CO2. That Is why current fuels are bad, we are adding more than what the planet was currently running off of.
- qxcvz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3heh, it'd be a cool fog show unless / until you suffocated yourself on the CO2! Still a need for good ventilation with this, though with outdoor work (on bricks) it probably wouldn't be too troublesome.
- CrazyNic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2We use a dry ice blaster at work to clean our molds...we have one that uses 500PSI and another that uses just 150PSI...the 500 one uses pellets and grinds them up...the 150 uses blocks and shaves the ice...both do a great job, but they will tear up anything soft, hard to imagine this working on books.
- LowGan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2this is pretty neat, I've never heard of it.
- diggin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Those of you talking about cost and/or price of this, shouldn't really care. They aren't saying this would be something that would be consumer grade, however for those in the cleaning industry, pressure washing, sand blasting, etc., this is a somewhat unheard of innovation. There are those projects that have to be cleaned in an environmentally sound way or the gov't will hop all over them if they don't take the proper procedures. This looks to be a way that something can be cleaned and the environment doesn't have to suffer, thus, both parties are happy.
- scotticus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Although CO2 is a greenhouse gas, all CO2 that's typically used (in our colas, beer, paintball markers, etc.) is a biproduct of another industrial process. We don't make CO2 just to have CO2, so there's no net gain in CO2 by using this form of cleaning. We're simply collecting this industrial biproduct and finding another use for it... seems like a good idea to me.
- johndi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2It's not that new, and is gaining acceptance. It is something I had never heard of before today, and from what I could tell in my search nothing similar had been submitted to Digg. Just one of those odd things that slipped through the cracks. I submitted it because their are a lot of professionals on this site, and I think people should know about it when there is a potential better way to do things.
Hell, they even use it to clean electrical control panels, and robots. The website I stumbled on was garbage, it took me a while to find a decent article to submit because of number of site linked to people wanting to sell the service/product to you. I didn't submit the following link because it looks would look a little spammy. It looks like a trade association webpage, so it has worldwide contact info on it.
http://www.dryiceinfo.com/cleaning.htm - stephen2417, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4Except it would be called the Iceoomba
- t0dd, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4Cool I hope this really catChes 0n 2..
- johndi, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3CO2 may be linked to global warming, but it isn't near as bad as the solvents they use in industrial cleaning. They are quite nasty. Sandblasting creates a big mess and causes wear and tear on parts, so it isn't friendly either.
That afraid of CO2? I hope you don't drink carbonated beverages. Odds are the power plant that lets you operate your computer has CO2 emissions as well. I hope you walk, barefoot, because any vehicle is responsible for CO2 as well. What, it's an electric vehicle? Trust me they had to extract the materials it was made out of somehow, and it isn't a 'green' process. Why barefoot? The manufacturing and transportation of your shoes caused CO2 to enter the atmosphere as well, and the soles are likely to be made from nasty petroleum. Oh, and like everything else you bought at a store your computer was transported in big nasty smoke belching trucks. It's motherboard was likely made in Taiwan in a factory that wasn't CO2 neutral, and got to you by boat or plane. I hate to shatter your illusions, but CO2 happens. - khag7, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1That amount of CO2 is not enough to be harmful even in a closed location. But the most likely situation is that the cleaning is done in open locations, warehouses, factories, outdoors. Even more, if it was dangerous or if they were in a small area, oxygen masks and tanks are not very expensive.
- BatticusMao, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2i could give a ***** about it being environmentally sound..if it means you don't have to clean up blasting media (which gets ***** everywhere if you try to blast without a cabinet) then it sounds good to me.
basically i agree with everything dwatch said... - ZMorek, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1My concerns are twofold.
How do they keep the dry ice from subliming away too quickly? Wouldn't cooling be resource intensive, or do they keep a lot on hand and proper ventiliation so that pressure doesn't build up in the hopper.
Would all that subliming CO2 create problems for the person dry-ice-blasting in terms of larger amounts of CO2 in the air in a poorly ventilated area? - spartan777, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1cool, now we just need the money for this. ehhh, what? economics aren't on their minds? another nice idea gone to waste.
- nwilliams, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0When I say "environmentally friendly", as opposed to sand blasting, dry ice blasting evaporates - leaving nothing to clean up, unlike sandblasting, where microfine particles may become something entirely more dangerous than they were prior to dry ice cleaning.
I threw in the CryoKinetics link - they were one of the first dry ice blasting equipment companies I was aware of. http://www.cryokinetics.com. - Celeron, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3Or Froomba, F for frost or fog.
- infra172, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Notice that the words "price" and "cost" appear nowhere in the article.
- liuite, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0the other alternative is baking soda...doesn't' that come from the earth?
this is often used by cities to remove graffiti - nwilliams, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Dry Ice blasting and CO2 blasting is a phenomenal service - no residue, environmentally friendly. Really helps with mold remediation and cleaning after a fire.
http://www.cryokinetics.com - joejacobi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Well, to comment on the 'Sand' factor - people are getting away from using sand blasting in certain situations because it's too aggressive and may leave sand in the 'wrong' place (mechanical equipment etc.) - Cost is a little more than the other ways of cleaning, but takes (usually on average) 30-50% less time - this includes clean up as well. Cost is higher on a per hour basis because the contractors cost is higher for Dry Ice supply - generally .30 cents/pound and a typical job may use 200pds of Dry Ice...There's so many applications for cleaning, new nozzles being developed for certain situation allows for a softer flow.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0Yeah, because SAND isn't "environmentally sound" (whatever the ***** that means). Not that I give a ***** about a product's claim of being "environmentally sound."
- whaught, on 10/12/2007, -14/+3More Co2... how environmentally friendly
- Celeron, on 10/12/2007, -21/+1I'm going to take a nice bath with dry ice. Maybe that will clean me up real good. Hopefully, it won't thaw my dick and have it fall off while in the process.
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