Cleaning
Cleaning is the process of removing unwanted substances, such as dirt, infectious agents, and other impurities, from an object or environment. Cleaning occurs in many different contexts, and uses many different methods. Several occupations are devoted to cleaning.
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Contexts
Cleaning occurs in various commercial, domestic, personal, and environmental contexts, which differ in scale and requirements.
- Commercial cleaning
- Terminal cleaning, in healthcare settings
- Environmental remediation, the removal of pollution or contaminants from the natural environment
- Housekeeping, including spring cleaning
- Hygiene, including personal grooming
Methods
Cleaning is broadly achieved through mechanical action and/or solvent action; many methods rely on both processes.
- Washing, usually done with water and often some kind of soap or detergent
- Pressure washing, using a high-pressure stream of water
- Abrasive blasting, typically used to remove bulk material from a surface, may be used to remove contaminants as well
- Acoustic cleaning, the use of sound waves to shake particulates loose from surfaces
- Ultrasonic cleaning, using ultrasound, usually from 20–400 kHz
- Megasonic cleaning, a gentler mechanism than ultrasonic cleaning, used in wafer, medical implant, and industrial part cleaning
- Carbon dioxide cleaning, a family of methods for parts cleaning and sterilization using carbon dioxide in its various phases
- Dry cleaning of clothing and textiles, using a chemical solvent other than water
- Flame cleaning of structural steel with an oxyacetylene flame
- Green cleaning, using environmentally friendly methods and products
- Plasma cleaning, using energetic plasma or dielectric barrier discharge plasma created from various gases
- Sputter cleaning, performed in a vacuum by using physical sputtering of the surface
- Steam cleaning, in both domestic and industrial contexts
- Thermal cleaning, in industrial settings, involving pyrolysis and oxidation
- Wet cleaning, methods of professional laundering that avoid the use of chemical solvents
Cleaning by item
Some items and materials require specialized cleaning techniques, due to their shape, location, or the material properties of the object and contaminants.
Buildings and infrastructure
Other items
- Coin cleaning
- Jewellery cleaning
- Laundry, the washing of clothes and other textiles
- Parts cleaning, in industry
- Pot washing, in food service
- Teeth cleaning
- Tube cleaning
Occupations involving cleaning
Several occupations involve cleaning, either in their entirety or among other duties.
gollark: If you tweak them at all, they probably stop working properly for unfathomable chemistry/physics reasons.
gollark: I mean, consider enzymes. They can do things which regular non-biochemist chemists could only dream of, and often do multiple functions at once and interact with each other in bizarre ways.
gollark: Much of the foolish human body is like this, because it's hyperoptimized in some ways by a design process which doesn't care if our brains can actually make sense of it.
gollark: No good spec sheet/documentation either.
gollark: And there's nowhere to source parts, and no way to swap, say, fried retinas out.
See also
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Look up cleaning in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
General
- Cleaning (disambiguation), for other uses of the term
- Cleanliness, an abstract concept for a state that may be achieved by cleaning
- Cleaning agent, substances used in cleaning
- Contamination control, of which cleaning is a part
Biology and health
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Organizing
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Other contexts
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