Dry Ice Blasting Robot: Solvents, Cold Jet and ABB

In tire plants, cured rubber and release agents build up on the mould surface until parts stick, show blemishes or come out with flash, and the line has to stop for cleaning. Dry ice blasting fires small pellets of solid carbon dioxide at the dirt in a stream of compressed air, and the pellets turn to gas, so no blasting media is left behind. A dry ice blasting robot holds the nozzle, so nobody has to stand in the noise. This post covers the scrapers, sand and solvents that came first, the invention of dry ice blasting, the first robot cells for tire moulds, this autumn's news and where ABB robots could fit. Shot peening is a different job, covered in our post on robotic shot peening.

Dry ice blasting used to clean electrical installations in an industrial hall in Čakovec, Croatia, 2017. Photo: Silverije / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Scrapers, sand and solvents before dry ice

Moulds used to be cleaned by hand or with abrasives. Cold Jet lists manual scraping, glass bead blasting and sand blasting as the traditional methods for tire moulds and calls them slow, ineffective and damaging to the moulds, with high labour and material costs. Chemical cleaning brings its own trouble, because the cleaner mixes with grease and contaminants and creates another waste stream to collect and dispose of. Downtime cost more than the cleaning itself. In figures from Conti-Machinery that Cold Jet quotes for conventional cleaning, the cleaning took 26 percent of press downtime, while dismantling, preheating and mounting the mould took 17, 20 and 21 percent.

A worker sandblasting in full coverage protective gear. Photo: NIOSH via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Dry ice blasting grew out of several experiments. The US Navy is believed to have tried it for degreasing in 1945, Unilever filed a patent in 1959 for removing meat from bone, Chemotronics International filed one in 1971 for deburring and deflashing, and Lockheed filed another in 1974. David Moore of Cold Jet received the first patents for modern single-hose systems in 1986 and 1988, and Cold Jet's single-hose machine was the first to be sold commercially. The pellets are typically 3 mm across. On impact they sublimate and take heat out of the surface, and that thermal shock loosens the dirt.

Dry ice pellets sublimating in water and giving off a thick white fog, 2007. Photo: Nevit / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Robots arrived through the tire industry. A Goodyear patent application filed in 1996 and published in 1998 describes a heated tire mould carried into an insulated, soundproof enclosure, where a nozzle on a robot arm fires frozen CO2 pellets at it while the mould turns on a rotary table. Goodyear preferred CO2 because it does not wear the mould and also cleans the tiny vents. Noise is one reason to keep people away. A later patent for a tire mould cleaning robot from the Turkish firm Lang Yüzer Otomotiv, first filed in Turkey in 2014 and granted in the US in 2019, notes that dry ice blasting makes noise over the safety limits for operators.

The Goodyear Tire and Rubber factory at Bowmanville seen from the air, around 1945. Photo: Canadian Statesman via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Robot cells at the tire press and the 2026 market

Cold Jet's ASP-T, described in a 2019 brochure, takes the robot to the press. An operator wheels the unit in front of the press and connects it, and a KUKA robot then cleans the top and bottom sidewalls of the mould in one run, following a recipe. The PCS 60 blaster inside cuts 3 mm pellets into 28 particle sizes down to 0.3 mm, and the system handles 14 to 22 inch moulds behind a blast protection wall with safety area monitoring. Cold Jet claims up to 70 percent less cleaning time than conventional methods. An operator still checks the mould by eye at the end.

Dry ice cleaning equipment ready for a job at the company CRYO'géni, 2020. Photo: Dawars333 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Service firms also bring the method to the customer. On 21 September 2026 Precision Dry Ice Cleaning of New Jersey announced mobile dry ice blasting across four states, noting that a mould can sometimes stay in the press and that the removed dirt still has to be collected. A Cape Times article on 21 October 2026 set out the environmental case: no water, no detergents and no spent blasting media, though ventilation, waste handling and energy still count. Even the ice can come from a robot-tended plant. At the end of May 2026 Nippon Sanso inaugurated a Cold Jet dry ice plant in Köping, Sweden, that makes 2.2 tonnes an hour and uses three robots to stack, strap, wrap and fill containers.

Fresh dry ice pellets pour from a pelletizer chute into a steel bin, 2020. Photo: Ltosnar / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

ABB has used dry ice blasting in its own production. A 2017 report from Foundry Planet describes how ABB removes silicone release agent from the casting moulds for a new insulator product with an ASCOJET dry ice unit, after grinding had left dirt behind and worn the moulds. The nozzle runs on a program-controlled linear drive inside a sound-insulated enclosure, and a temperature sensor watches the ice stream. No source shows an ABB robot holding a dry ice nozzle, so a robot cell is a possibility. ABB's Foundry Plus versions are built for dirty cells: on the IRB 4600 that means IP67, resistant paint and a rust-protected mounting flange.

An ABB robot seen between the open halves of a die casting die. ABB builds protected Foundry versions of its robots for wet, dirty cells. Photo: ABB

Where dry ice blasting robots go next

The Conti-Machinery figures show why cleaning in place matters: dismantling, preheating and mounting took 58 percent of press downtime, against 26 percent for the cleaning. Rubber and plastic moulds can be cleaned at operating temperature without leaving the press. ABB also protects small robots for wet, dirty work. The IRB 1300 Foundry Plus 2 version, added in 2021 for jobs such as die casting, forging and machining, has a stainless steel end effector so it does not rust when liquids wash away dust and metal debris. A cell like this can be planned in RobotStudio before the blast wall goes up.

An ABB IRB 1300 with Foundry Plus 2 protection working inside a guarded cell. Photo: ABB

Outside factories, people meet dry ice blasting through restoration work. It is used after mould, smoke, fire and water damage, on historic objects such as the USS Monitor and at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and on cars, where it removes oil, carbon and dust from engines. Precision Dry Ice Cleaning offers its mobile service to private owners as well as businesses, for vehicles and boats. Food processing uses it too, and a 2004 UK Food Standards Agency report documented dry ice decontaminating surfaces of Salmonella, E. coli and Listeria, though we found no source for robots doing that on food lines yet.

Dry ice blasting removes the original underbody coating from a 1981 Volkswagen Derby. Photo: Geesmo1337 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Carbon dioxide is the main hazard. It becomes increasingly toxic above 1 percent and can push out oxygen in poorly ventilated rooms, and because it is heavier than air, exhaust vents belong near the floor. Dry ice is about minus 78 °C, so operators need insulated gloves along with eye and ear protection. Enclosures help with the noise and the gas: Goodyear's 1996 design put the robot in a soundproof box, and ABB's own dry ice unit sits with its exhaust system inside a sound-insulated enclosure. Supply and skills remain, since plants need a steady flow of fresh ice and staff who can set a cleaning recipe for each mould.

A white ABB foundry robot works in steam at a Bühler die casting cell. Photo: ABB

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