Fabric compatibility and cleaning effectiveness of drycleaning with carbon dioxide

Liquid carbon dioxide (CO{sub 2}) offers an environmentally sound replacement solvent to the currently used drycleaning solvent, perchloroethylene (PERC). In addition to the health and safety benefits of a CO{sub 2} based cleaning system, large savings in solvent costs provide an incentive for conversion to the new system. Lower operating costs for the new technology provide further incentive. Experimental studies were conducted using CO{sub 2} in both small scale and pilot scale test systems in order to address fabric compatibility with this alternative cleaning method. Results from these tests show that fabric shrinkage using CO{sub 2} is controlled to the same level as current drycleaning methods. In addition, tests to evaluate the cleaning performance of liquid CO{sub 2} drycleaning were also conducted. These results show the prototype liquid CO{sub 2} cleaning system to be better than PERC at soil removal, and worse than PERC at inorganic salt removal