Cryogenic Deflashing
Cryogenic Deflashing is a process used on plastic and rubber parts to remove molding flash and/or machining or grinding burrs.
What is Cryogenic Deflashing?
Before and After Comparison
With Cryogenic Deflashing, plastic or rubber parts are taken down a temperature where the material becomes brittle. Then the parts are tumbled and blasted with a fine polycarbonate media breaking the flash or burr off of the part without damaging the rest of the part. It is a very efficient process to deflash or deburr plastic and rubber parts in bulk.
What can it do for you?
With our Leonard Enterprises CMB-2 Cryogenic Deflashing machine and a 4000 gallon bulk liquid nitrogen tank we can efficiently process up to 2 cubic feet of parts per batch to remove or reduce parting line flash, overmolding flash, engineered flash and burrs created from machining or grinding. A variety of parts from large to small and fragile of a variety of plastics and rubbers can be processed by programming the media blast velocity, media size, basket speed, cycle time and temperature for the application. Cryogenic Deflashing is not applicable to metal parts.
How it’s done
Parts are placed bulk in the machine basket.
The basket of parts is sealed in an enclosed chamber.
With gaseous nitrogen the chamber of parts is lowered to cryogenic temperatures as low as -200°F.
The basket of parts is then rotated while being blasted with fine polycarbonate media breaking off the flash or burr on the part.
Parts are removed from basket.
What are the benefits?
Removing flash and burrs manually is inexpensive but also slow and inconsistent.
Removing flash and burrs through the cryogenic deflashing/deburring process is:
Cost-effective
Typical charges amount to pennies (or less) per part.
Consistent
Computer-controlled, programs can be written for each part making the process repeatable on future lots and consistent over the part life.
Quick
Short cycle times with high throughput, batch processing. Typical turn-around time is 1-3 days.
Does not damage parts
Removes only the flash or burrs being targeted, maintaining edges and geometries that are critical to part function.
Range of materials
Most natural and synthetic rubber and plastic polymers can be deflashed/deburred. (NR, NBR, EPDM, FKM and many more.)
Before and After picture examples of large parts, small intricate parts, incoming sheets of parts.
