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Liquid C02 cleaning for sleeping bags/quilts
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Home › Forums › Gear Forums › Gear (General) › Liquid C02 cleaning for sleeping bags/quilts
- This topic has 5 replies, 5 voices, and was last updated 6 years, 6 months ago by David Thomas.
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Sep 9, 2017 at 10:23 am #3490069
At PCT Days there was a company called Renewal Workshop that was offering to clean down sleeping bags using a Liquid C02 process. I have never heard of this method before.
Has anyone used this method for cleaning there down sleeping bags, and what were your thoughts?
Sep 9, 2017 at 10:49 am #3490075https://renewalworkshop.com/en/general/faq
No oil stripping detergent for my down, thanks.
But I guess that could be changed.
Sep 9, 2017 at 6:09 pm #3490116Maybe Renewal Workshop’s liquid CO2 process (from TERSUS Solutions) isn’t that bad for down garments. They sell some down-looking jackets, like this one:
https://renewalworkshop.com/en/RW103431-1087400052950101.html
though their web site is short on insulation details. As George said, would be nice to here from real customers.
Patagonia bought the first TERSUSÂ liquid CO2 washing machine a couple of years ago for their Common Threads program. Patagonia also was one of TERSUS early investors.
http://www.tersussolutions.com/tersusblog/2015/3/4/first-commercial-system-ships
Too bad no chemical engineers hang out on BPL who could tell us more about cleaning with liquid CO2 :-)
— Rex
Sep 9, 2017 at 7:10 pm #3490124Guess we will never know.
Sep 9, 2017 at 8:59 pm #3490131Back in my pharma research days we experimented with supercritical CO2 extraction for use in cleaning residual monomers and oligomers from biodegradable polymers. CO2 in an excellent and inert solvent for cleaning stuff, but you have to get it to be a fluid to use it, which requires very high pressures. So if you scale it up, you’d need some VERY big, thick, heavy stainless steel components – expensive equipment. Coffee companies use something similar for decaffeinating coffee products, but I’m not familiar with that application.
Sep 9, 2017 at 9:36 pm #3490140Yeah, what Lester said. Â Super-critical CO2 is a very effective solvent, second perhaps only to water in the range of things it will dissolve at a low temperature.
When all the chlorinated solvents were being discovered in the soil and water under dry cleaners, paint shops, plating operations and electronics manufacturers, there was a lot of interest in a cleaner alternative and liquid CO2 was an obvious choice between its solvent properties and that if you leak any, it just evaporates away.
But having to keep it above 1000 psi means that everything – the washing machine, the pipes, the filtering apparatus – have to built like a submarine. Â Including the hatches through which you load and unload clothes. Â And when pressure increase in volume (diameter), the wall thickness must too. Â Hatches likewise have to be much stronger as you increase the size to something useable.
Then there is the energy required to compress the CO2 gas into a liquid and the refrigeration equipment to remove the heat of compression.
No wonder TCE and PCE were such popular solvents for so long.
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