If a child is told to wash her hands and then reappears flinging soap suds and water around the room, then the local adult is apt to send her back for additional reprocessing. In product manufacturing, there are three steps in the overall cleaning process: washing (cleaning), rinsing, and drying. Understanding the functions of these three steps is a powerful business tool to achieve high product quality at a lower cost. Unfortunately, those of us involved in surface preparation and quality and contamination control may use the terms imprecisely. Cleaning may mean only the initial removal of soil or encompass several steps in the surface preparation process.
01 September, 2005