Contract Cleaning – when in-house cleaning is not an option.
Precision engineering company MG Sanders were faced with a challenging cleaning issue as part of a €5.3m contract for the upgrade of the JET Nuclear Fusion reactor situated at CCFE, Culham.
MG supply Inconel (nickel chromium super alloy) diverter modules to JET which are required to be cleaned to a UHV designated component cleaning specification. Since this was expected to be a one off project it didn’t warrant MG investing in new cleaning equipment in order to do the cleaning ‘in house’. Equally they recognised that, due to the strict cleaning standard and the necessary process validation and cleanliness testing, that their usual subcontract cleaning was not really an option. Since their contract was wholly reliant on them being able to meet this part of the specification they were in need of an alternative.
MG contacted Layton Technologies who primarily design and build precision cleaning equipment. They have a wide experience in component cleaning in virtually every area of industry, including the most technically demanding. They were ideally placed to work closely with MG and their end user to develop a specific cleaning process which would help them to achieve UHV designated component cleanliness with the appropriate process validation. Once the cleaning process had been agreed Layton then went on to process a total 31,000 parts at their facilities in North Staffordshire.
Layton has both solvent and aqueous cleaning facilities available for specialist sub-contract cleaning, and access to testing and evaluation laboratories if required. Contract cleaning can be the most efficient option to cleaning where the nature of the contract may be short-term and highly specialised or where volumes involved do not justify investment in an in-house facility.