No, the Vertrel^® products are not Mil-Spec approved. And that's not a fault of the product or DuPont -- it's because old-style "military specifications" are no longer being used.

In the old days, say the 1960s, when governments decided they needed a new jet, missile or submarine the military would specify every aspect of the manufacture of that system. These specifications included the types of solvents which were acceptable to use when cleaning the components. In most mil specs, the only acceptable solvents were CFC-113 and alcohol blends, or pure alcohol itself. Since nobody wanted to deal with flammable solvents, and even fewer wanted to deal with government inspectors, everybody defaulted to the safe and popular CFC-based cleaners.

Then CFCs went away, leaving people confused on their cleaning procedures. The military was stuck, too, because they were having trouble buying CFCs for their own internal use. So in the 1990s the military, in conjunction with the I.P.C., developed MIL-STD-2000 as the first of the performance-based cleaning specifications.

In effect, MIL-STD-2000 allowed the manufacturer to use any solvent they wanted -- provided they could prove the new cleaning method was at least as good as the old cleaning method. So customers would perrform before-and-after benchmark tests and compare the results. If the cleaner worked well they were free to use newer, more environmentally-friendly cleaners.

Today, virtually all cleaning is done to these new standards (with the exception of a very few old military and nuclear projects). Because those old standards were so rigid and unchanging, mil-specs have basically faded away from the modern industrial landscape, and now are as hard to find as dinosaurs, Edsels and hula-hoops. In the place of the CFCC solvents, Vertrel^® has been widely adopted because it delivers cleaning that meets or exceeds the requirements of the old military standards. Even the high-performance systems on the Space Shuttle now are cleaned using Vertrel^®.

Vertrel^® specialty fluids are the ideal choice for many demanding cleaning applications. These are great replacements for ozone-depleting solvents such as CFC-113, 1,1,1-trichloroethane, HCFC-141b, n-propyl bromide (nPB), HFE solvents and HCFC-225, as well as high-global-warming solvents such as perfluorocarbons (PFCs).

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