Technical Cleanliness

Technical cleanliness

The continued innovation and improvement of manufactured components relies on the ability of manufacturers to create products quickly and reliably without sacrificing quality. With increasing standards of cleanliness, ever more thorough analyses of parts are required to ensure they meet these high expectations. Additionally, the surface cleanliness of components is critical for the adhesion of additional coatings and treatments, directly correlating to the final quality of the part. In fact, cleanliness has been shown to correlate so closely to field failure rate that the German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA) and the International Organization of Standards (ISO) developed comprehensive standards specifically for characterizing the cleanliness of automotive components.

Cleanliness testing

Overall, this means that common methodologies for technical cleanliness, which offer limited analytical detail, may be unnecessarily restrictive. Inevitably, this leads to increased diagnostic time as manufacturers try to find the origin of the contamination from incomplete information, consequently increasing the cost to manufacture the part. Scanning electron microscopy/energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM/EDX), meanwhile, provides the chemical composition of individual particles. This allows the manufacturer to set different cleanliness limits for particles that are most harmful for the component, whereas limits for benign particles can be more relaxed. 

Thermo Fisher Scientific offers a range of instrumentation and software that not only simplifies your cleanliness analysis, but also greatly reduces your production time as you bring the quality control process inhouse. By no longer relying on outsourcing for your QC analysis, production cycle time can increase up to ten-fold while giving you the peace of mind of controlling your valuable and confidential data.