Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sustainability

In the past few years, cleanability of mechanical components became a new engineering constraint in the automotive and aerospace industry due to a rapid increase in the complexity of engines, transmissions, suspension components, etc. Cleaning processes currently used in industry are quite inefficient as they incur significant energy and consumable costs and, in many cases, cannot achieve the degree of cleanliness necessary to meet performance and service life requirements of the components. There is a good amount of scope to improve the existing technology with analytical and computational tools that can help predict and control cleaning effect at design and process planning stages. On the other hand, an improvement in the understanding of the mechanics of chip cleanability which involves interactions between the cleaning fluid and the chip critical and workpiece bottleneck dimensions can help us investigate the development of new technologies that enhance the phenomenon that aid in the cleanability of these solid particle contaminants. This work discusses the potential of using a two-phase air-water mixture for the internal cleaning of complex automotive components like the cylinder heads of internal combustion engines, by selectively exploiting specific properties of the mixture, different from its individual components.