The 5th FiT2clean Award recognized innovations in forward-looking industrial parts cleaning during the 34th Symposium on Industrial Parts Cleaning on June 25, 2026, in Esslingen.
SLCR Lasertechnik GmbH secured the FiT’s FiT2clean Award, worth 10,000 euros, with the development of a system for the laser cleaning of bulk materials. Sita Messtechnik GmbH and Elma Schmidbauer GmbH took second and third place, respectively. The innovation that earned SLCR Lasertechnik the 2026 FiT2clean Award makes it possible, for the first time, to use laser cleaning to prepare bulk materials such as screws, nuts, rivets, and clips prior to coating and electrogalvanizing. With the new Lama system, all previously required preparation steps can be eliminated. In the enclosed system, up to 250 kg of bulk material is cleaned in a single pass using laser technology. Depending on the shape and size of the parts, processing times inside the chamber vary between approximately 5 and 25 minutes. The clean process requires only an exhaust system. After processing, the parts can be transferred directly to the coating line. It has also been shown that, compared to conventional methods, longer dwell times for the materials between cleaning and coating result in less impairment of the surface quality for the coating.
Second Place in the FiT2clean Awards for Fluorescence Imaging Technology
Second place went to Sita Messtechnik for the FluoSpection Qube, a new development in the field of fluorescence imaging technology designed for area-wide and spatially resolved inspection of film cleanliness. The goal was to transfer the detection sensitivity of point-based fluorescence measurements to a wide-area measurement while simultaneously making the distribution of film-based contaminants visible, evaluable, and documentable. To this end, the measurement system combines defined measurement conditions, simple operation, automated evaluation, and comprehensive documentation. This results in a technically significantly improved, industrially viable, and at the same time affordable alternative to existing imaging approaches. The testing procedure is deliberately kept simple: insert the component, start the measurement, display the result, select relevant areas or predefined specifications, perform the evaluation, and document the results. Precise, time-consuming positioning of the component is not required, as the software supports alignment, rotation, and image assignment.
Measurement of the cavitation noise level as the third step
Elma Schmidbauer secured third place with the development of the innovative Elmasens Cavicheck measurement solution for the reliable measurement of ultrasonic cavitation noise levels. During testing, the device floats on the surface of the bath, powers itself using energy harvested from the ultrasonic waves, and measures cavitation noise in accordance with the IEC TS 63001 standard. Once the measurement is complete, the data remains encrypted within the device and is stored in the integrated NFC memory in the form of a web URL along with the device’s unique ID; an NFC-enabled smartphone serves as a neutral transmission channel to a secure web application. There, the measurement and the measured ultrasonic bath are combined, supplemented with process parameters such as temperature, cleaning agent concentration, gas content, or water quality, and issued as a certificate. This new development thus enables the measurement-data-based, reproducible, simple, efficient, and sustainable qualification of ultrasonic baths.
With the “FiT2clean Award,” FiT annually recognizes outstanding achievements and solutions in industrial parts cleaning. The next FiT2clean Award will be presented during the upcoming parts2clean trade show, which takes place October 7–9 2027 in Stuttgart.