Company’s ‘In-House Goody’ Is Going Public : Cleaner: The solution, originally used in manufacture of optical components, is seen as an effective alternative to chlorofluorocarbons.

An organic cleaner that helped a small company eliminate defects 15 years ago is being offered as an answer to current environmental safety demands that industry giants are committing huge sums to satisfy.

The soil-release process was held for years as an “in-house goody” by developer L.H. Sampson, who cites it as an effective alternative to the chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, said to imperil the atmosphere’s protective ozone layer. Furthermore, he says, it is so safe that “a child can drink it.”

The electronics industry is under mounting pressure to reduce CFCs from the Occupational Health and Safety Administration and from the Environmental Protection Agency, which estimates solvents make up about 18% of domestic CFC use.

The threat of skin cancer from exposure to increased ultraviolet radiation resulting from depletion of the ozone layer prompted the EPA to mandate a 50% cut in CFCs by 1999. The United Nations is considering even more rigorous rules.

When Sampson, 75, first developed the organic aqueous solution cleaner, he recalls, “Our use was in the manufacture of optical components of very high sophistication. It was a breakthrough for us, an in-house goody.”

Now the use of computers everywhere from the elementary school classroom to General Motors Corp. presents a growing environmental hazard through application of CFCs or other agents.

There are significant problems with the others, says Sampson--a nasty smell, residues that may be dangerous to breathing or, worse yet, may cause a flash fire.

Marty Adleman, program manager at Speedring Systems Inc. in Rochester Hills, Mich., said he had been using products distributed by Novi Optical for seven or eight months in the manufacture of “very close tolerance metal objects which have to be tested close to the atomic level.”

“It’s the safest thing I’ve found to use, and also works the quickest,” he said.

Novi Optical Cleaning Products in the Detroit suburb of Novi now distributes the line of cleaners. William Carson Lapp, national sales manager at Novi, said the products contain no alcohol, glycerin or silicon. He said they are bacteria free, exceed all OSHA and EPA health and safety standards and are completely biodegradable.

Sampson said he developed the process at a former manufacturing plant in Farmington, Mich., where he produced parts for Burroughs, the computer maker which later joined Sperry to form Unisys.

With the CFCs he was using, he found he could never completely rid a surface of residues, which build up in layers and produce stress.

“You’ve left a trace on the surface. You can never get it out, no matter how many times you clean it, you can never get the residue,” Sampson said. “Ours is a completely different approach. We get the soil to be released at the surface without solvent, by counteracting the bonding energy that keeps the soil adhering to the surface.

“When you need something atomically clean, as we do in the semiconductor world, in the optical world, you have to do something completely different,” he said. “This is an aqueous solution, a super-high-quality solution.”

At his former manufacturing plant, he said, “this was the key to reducing the rejection rate in production. We had less than 1% failure rate.”

“And then I was taken ill with a stroke and that ended that type of career,” he said. “But my life was in the scientific world, from the university to research labs.”

He worked in development of a number of products in use around the world, including the holography that produces a three-dimensional image on credit cards.

But he is perhaps most proud of using holography in the testing of aircraft tires.

“When an aircraft tire gets hot on repeated landings the core weakens, and without holography techniques it is difficult to tell when it is going to fail,” he said. “So we saved an awful lot of airplane crashes. That was a major contribution.”

After 15 years, he thought, “someone surely would have come up with what I had” in producing a reliable, environmentally safe cleaner.

“But that was not the case, although much money is being spent in that direction,” he said. “We held it in propriety as an in-house goody for a number of years and this is the first time we’ve made any attempt to market it.”