FiT2clean Award 2026 Presented: Innovation Award for Industrial Parts Cleaning

SLCR Lasertechnik GmbH won the FiT’s FiT2clean Award, worth 10,000 euros, for developing a system for the laser cleaning of bulk materials. Sita Messtechnik GmbH and Elma Schmidbauer GmbH took second and third place, respectively. The innovation that earned SLCR Lasertechnik the 2026 FiT2clean Award makes it possible, for the first time, to use laser cleaning to prepare bulk materials such as screws, nuts, rivets, and clips prior to coating and electrogalvanizing. With the new Lama system, all previously required preparation steps can be eliminated. In the enclosed system, up to 250 kg of bulk material is cleaned in a single pass using laser technology. Depending on the shape and size of the parts, processing times in the chamber vary between approximately 5 and 25 minutes. The clean process requires only an exhaust system. After processing, the parts can be transferred directly to the coating line. It has also been shown that, compared to conventional methods, longer dwell times for the materials between cleaning and coating result in less impairment of surface quality for the coating.

Second Place in the FiT2clean Award for Fluorescence Imaging Technology

Second place went to Sita Messtechnik for the FluoSpection Qube, a new development in the field of imaging fluorescence measurement technology for area-wide and spatially resolved inspection of film cleanliness. The goal was to transfer the detection sensitivity of point-based fluorescence measurements to a surface-wide measurement while simultaneously making the distribution of film-based contaminants visible, evaluable, and documentable. To achieve this, the measurement system combines defined measurement conditions, simple operation, automated evaluation, and comprehensive documentation. This results in a technically significantly improved, industrially viable, and at the same time affordable alternative to existing imaging approaches. The testing procedure is deliberately kept simple: insert the component, start the measurement, display the result, select relevant areas or predefined specifications, perform the evaluation, and document the results. Precise positioning of the component is not required, as the software supports alignment, rotation, and assignment of the images.

Measurement of the cavitation noise level takes third place

Elma Schmidbauer secured third place with the development of the innovative Elmasens Cavicheck measurement solution for the reliable measurement of the cavitation noise level of ultrasound. During the test, the device floats on the surface of the bath, powers itself via energy harvesting from the ultrasonic sound waves, and records the cavitation noise in accordance with the IEC TS 63001 standard. Once the measurement is complete, the data remains encrypted within the device and is stored in the integrated NFC memory in the form of a web URL along with the unique device ID; an NFC-enabled smartphone serves as a neutral transmission channel to a secure web application. There, the measurement and the ultrasonic bath being measured are combined, supplemented with process parameters such as temperature, cleaning agent concentration, gas content, or water quality, and issued as a certificate. This new development thus enables measurement-data-based, reproducible, simple, efficient, and sustainable qualification of ultrasonic baths. With the “FiT2clean Award,” FiT annually honors outstanding achievements and solutions in industrial parts cleaning.