Chemical Cleaning

Chemical cleaning is usually used to remove oil or grease contaminants from your fabricated components.

There are five types of chemical cleaning processes which are regularly used in the coating industry, organic solvent cleaning, vapour degreasing, emulsifiable solvent cleaning, alkaline chemical cleaning and acid chemical cleaning. Each has its merits and constraints.

At Ridgewood Powder Coating we use acid cleaning methods.

Acid cleaning is useful for the removal of surface rust or scaling on steels and steel alloys. It is also particularly useful for the removal of the oxide layer from Aluminium, which is often present on the products we receive.

The downside of acid cleaners is that they take longer to remove oils and greases from the substrate surface that the other methods discussed above. As a safeguard, we therefore also employ solvent washing of all our work before the application of the powder coat.