Lab update of activities for June 2009

Alternative Cleaning Testing
As our fiscal year finished up, the TURI Lab had a very successful year. We met out goal of working with 25 companies. We conducted 125 cleaning trials for these companies. Our students also conducted 35 cleaning trials based on search requests from the CleanerSolutions website.

Our most recent project evaluated the performance of a new aerosol cleaning product line. The testing compared this new set of safer cleaning products against several other product lines for cleaning performance, odor, residue, gloss, and vertical cling. The Aspire products were as effective as the traditional aerosol formulations in many of the tests.

Another project evaluated the performance of automatic dish washing soaps. These products were compared against an industry standard product. These products were tested following ASTM D3556 Deposition on Glassware During Mechanical Dishwashing and the labs modified version of ASTM G122 Evaluating the Effectiveness of Cleaning Agents.

Students in the lab continued our testing on the Do-it-Yourself cleaning recipes.

Database
The CleanerSolutions database had features added through out the past 12 months. A new Contact the Lab feature was added, making it easier for end users to get their questions answered. An on-line survey was created that should help us continue to make changes based on the needs of the database users.

A new search feature is just being fined tuned that will allow for searching based on part descriptions.

As of now the database contains testing results for 1,860 trials run at the TURI Lab since 1993. That's about a 115 trials a year or about 1 trial every 3 days for 16 years.

Since January 2009, there have been 58,000 searches conducted using the database. From June to July, there have been 2500 visitors to the site from all 50 states and the District of Columbia as well as 76 other countries/territories.

Outreach
The lab is currently working on a chapter for the 2nd edition of the Handbook of Critical Cleaning. The chapter will focus on metal cleaning and how to select, test and implement safer cleaning products. Several case studies will be included on companies the we helped in the past year and a half.

We are still working on the setting up a disinfection-sanitation performance testing lab within the School of Health and Environment at UMass Lowell.

The lab has been asked to serve on the steering committee for the upcoming Process Cleaning Conference. The conference is being put together upon the realization that the cleaning industry has been void of any type of trade show in North America for 8 years. PCX will be the only event in North America dedicated to cleaning within the manufacturing process.

Presentations were given in 2008-9 at ASM's Heat Treating symposium in October, TUR Planner continuing education conference in November and at the Kansas State University Pollution Prevention Institute Seminar in March.

New Cleaning Process
We have two Active Ion units in the lab and will begin testing for performance this fall. We hope to include this product as part of pilot for the disinfection-sanitation performance testing lab.