Dry Ice Blasting for Paper Mill Equipment

A few weeks ago, several of our employees worked on a dry ice blasting project at a paper mill in New England. This paper mill specializes in filtration products, engineered papers and industrial non-wovens. Employees of this particular paper mill needed to clean several of their paper and filter manufacturing machines. One of these particular machines was a large drier with nine massive rollers. Rather than clean these machines by hand as done in the past, the Cryogenic Institute of New England, Inc. was chosen to clean the machines using its Nitrofreeze® Dry Ice Blasting Service. The plan was to clean three machines in a total of five days. One of these days includes a Saturday due to the New Year’s holiday.

I had the opportunity to go to the paper mill. The first day I went was to help get the equipment there, unload the truck, set-up our dry ice blasting equipment and start blasting the large drier. The first three steps went very smoothly and we started blasting at about 10:15AM. We decided to dry ice blast the two rollers at each end first before blasting the rollers above and in the middle of the machine. Each roller had a different degree of buildup that needed to be removed. In order to clean the rollers properly, we had to keep jogging the entire machine. Overall, it was a complex process, but the results were apparent. The rollers cleaned up very well and in far less time than it would take to do them by hand. Below is a picture of Robin dry ice blasting the roller. You can see the areas that have been cleaned on the roller.



Paper mill equipment is a good application for dry ice blasting. Rather than cleaning by hand with cleansers; dry ice blasting offers a safe, environmentally-friendly and faster way to clean. More surface area can be cleaned in a faster amount of time, reducing machine downtime. Dry ice blast cleaning also takes off contaminants without all the scrubbing which is labor intensive. If you are trying to reduce machine downtime while cleaning and want to be “green”, then dry ice blasting is a great way to clean. Below is a picture of a roller being dry ice blast cleaned. In the picture you can see the dry ice sublimating upon impact. This makes for less cleanup when compared to sand blasting, soda blasting and pressure washing.



If you would like to gain more knowledge about dry ice blasting, please visit our dry ice blasting webpage. We offer dry ice blast cleaning as a service to our customers. If you have an application that requires dry ice blasting, we are happy to come to your site and provide a no-cost assessment. We have completed many dry ice blast projects, but our specialty is heavy industrial equipment. For inquiries relating to dry ice blasting please email info@nitrofreeze.com or call us at (508) 459-7447.