Cleaning and liquid contact with solids – Apparatus – Automatic controls
Patent
1989-04-12
1990-05-01
Coe, Philip R.
Cleaning and liquid contact with solids
Apparatus
Automatic controls
134123, 134181, 239752, B60S 304
Patent
active
049209973
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
The invention relates to a vehicle washing installation, in particular for vehicles with a very rugged surface, comprising several spray nozzles for a cleaning liquid possibly with chemicals added thereto arranged next to one another transversely to the longitudinal direction of the vehicle along a portal and moved past the vehicle in the longitudinal direction of the vehicle. The spray nozzles are designed as rotor nozzles which deliver one point contact jet each. The point contact jet issues at an acute angle of up to approximately 30 degrees at the most at an incline to the axis of rotation of the rotor nozzles and describes the lateral area of a cone.
Commercial vehicles, in particular vehicles of the building industry and vehicles with irregular bodies cannot be washed with the customary brush washing installations on account of the geometry of the vehicles. Therefore, cleaning with a manually guided high-pressure spraying device is necessary.
Vehicle washing installations are known wherein flat water jets for cleaning the vehicle are generated from spray nozzles mounted on water supply pipes. The cleaning liquid may, for example, be a water vapor mixture (DE-B-3 436 061). Heated or unheated water under high pressure with or without the addition of chemicals may also be used as cleaning liquid. In order to achieve a surface effect with these known cleaning installations, the nozzles are designed as flat jet nozzles with a spray angle of between 15 and 60 degrees. While these solutions produce satisfactory results in the cleaning of vehicle contours with flat surfaces they fail with rugged vehicle contours owing to the deceleration and atomization of the flat jets in air. The range of these flat jets within which effective cleaning can still be achieved is limited to about 0.5 m. At a distance of 1 m from the nozzle, the soiled surface will only be wetted. The mechanical effect originating from the impact pressure and required for the cleaning is not achievable.
A motor vehicle washing installation is known from DE-B-1 806 634 wherein several nozzles are arranged along a portal, each of these carrying at the end of a flexible hose piece on outlet nozzle which can rotate along the lateral area of a cone possibly by means of the repulsion effect and hence generate a rotating cleaning jet. In such an installation, it is necessary to place nozzles of this type very close to each other in order to achieve thorough cleaning of the entire surface of the motor vehicle. Since the above-mentioned nozzles become worn rapidly by the moved hose parts, such an installation requires extraordinarily intensive maintenance. Difficulties may also arise in the cleaning of a rugged surface because if there is an insufficient number of nozzles, there is the possibility that the jet at a certain vehicle height will always hit the surface at a certain angle only and so reliable cleaning is not possible where there are undercuts.
The object of the invention is to propose a vehicle washing installation which may also be used for cleaning vehicles with a very rugged surface.
This object is accomplished, in accordance with the invention, in a vehicle washing installation of the kind described at the beginning by the spray nozzles being movable back and forth along the portal around a vehicle in a plane lying transversely to the longitudinal axis of the vehicle, with the amplitude of the motion of neighbouring spray nozzles being at least so large that the parts of the vehicle over which their point contact jets repeatedly pass adjoin one another.
Point contact jets remain sharply focused over quite a large distance and so even at a distance in the order of magnitude of 1 m or more from the spray nozzle there is still enough impact energy contained in the jet to achieve a reliable cleaning effect.
The point contact jet circulates along the lateral area of a cone and hence reaches quite a large surface area of the vehicle in both a direction lying transversely to the longitudinal axis of the vehicle and a direction lying parallel t
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Hafner Kurt
Krautter Jurgen
Schulze Werner
Vetter Kurt
Alfred Karcher GmbH & Co.
Coe Philip R.
Lipsitz Barry R.
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