Karl Roll: Focus—A Cost-Effective Solvent-Based Parts Cleaning System
With Focus, Karl Roll has introduced a cost-effective solvent cleaning system that delivers high cleaning quality even at low throughput rates. It features all the essential components needed to meet high standards even when processing relatively small volumes of items to be cleaned.
In an increasing number of cases, parts cleaning operations are handling smaller batch sizes while having to meet higher cleanliness standards. The cleaning process must not only be reliable and reproducible, but also particularly cost-effective and resource-efficient. To address this challenge, equipment manufacturer Karl Roll has developed the new Focus. This cost-effective, enclosed solvent system offers an excellent price-performance ratio, making it possible to implement high-quality component cleaning even with a limited investment budget. The compact cleaning system takes up very little production space and requires only an industrial power supply and a compressed air connection. The Focus operates under full vacuum and can be run with hydrocarbons or modified alcohols. The process chamber is designed for batches measuring up to 565 x 365 x 250 mm and weighing up to 50 kg.
High-cleanliness features integrated as standard
In designing this new plug-and-play solution, the equipment manufacturer has integrated everything as standard to ensure that high cleanliness specifications are achieved in a process-stable and repeatable manner. These include, among other things, two solvent tanks with separate media circuits and bypass filtration. These can be used for pre-cleaning and fine cleaning when very high cleanliness requirements apply. Alternatively, it is possible to use one tank for cleaning and the second for preserving the parts. In either case, two high-performance pumps ensure rapid drainage of the working chamber. Furthermore, the standard version of the system is equipped with an ultrasonic unit whose frequency and power can be adjusted to meet company-specific requirements. A loading aid ensures ergonomic operation during manual part feeding. Upon customer request, this can also be upgraded to an automatic loading and unloading system. A barcode scanning system is available as an additional option for unmanned operation.
Parts Cleaning System for Energy- and Resource-Efficient Operation
To keep operating costs as low as possible, special attention was paid to low energy consumption when selecting system components such as the vacuum pump, heater, and drain pumps. This results in an optimal ratio of component performance to energy consumption. In addition, like all of the manufacturer’s solvent cleaning systems, the Focus comes standard with an integrated distillation unit for the continuous regeneration of the solvent. Distilled-out oil is continuously removed from the distillation unit via an automatic oil discharge system, ensuring that the solvent remains free of residual oil for a very long time. This significantly extends the service life of the cleaning medium. In addition to the energy-efficient units, the use of waste heat from the distillation unit and the effective insulation of all heated components contribute to the system’s energy-efficient operation. Dislodged particulate contaminants are removed by a filter unit. By focusing on essential design details necessary to meet high cleanliness requirements, the cost-efficient Focus solvent system sets new standards for economic efficiency and resource consumption, even with low cleaning volumes.
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