Toward Environmental Burden Modeling of Industrial Cleaning Processes

In recent years, "greener" alternatives to solvent cleaning have been proposed in the literature. However, researchers have proposed few mathematical models for predicting relevant environmental burdens associated with these "greener" cleaning processes. As a consequence, process engineers do not know how to quantitatively assess the ¿greenness¿ of cleaning processes. Thus, to properly support environmentally conscious process planning of cleaning processes they need to know how to model relevant environmental burdens with equations that they will be inclined to use. In this paper, we review the industrial metal parts cleaning processes claimed to be "green" in the literature. We particularly focus on cleaning processes that follow machining processes. We then propose using a generic framework comprised of auxiliary processes and simple mathematical equations to model the relevant environmental burdens of these cleaning processes. We apply these models to a gear cleaning example. Authors: F. Roman, B. Bras (Georgia Institute of Technology)