cleaning of fabrics in non-aqueous solvents
A dry-cleaner in East Germany, 1975
Dry cleaning is any cleaning process for clothing and textiles using a solvent other than water. Clothes are instead soaked in a water-free liquid organic solvent (usually non-polar, as opposed to water which is a polar solvent) typically inside a specialised dry-cleaning machine. The most commonly used solvent is perchloroethylene (known as "PCE" or "perc" for short), although other solvents such as hydrocarbon mixtures and decamethylcyclopentasiloxane are also used. Historical solvents include gasoline, kerosene, Stoddard solvent, carbon tetrachloride, trichloroethylene, trichlorotrifluoroethane, trichloroethane and n-propyl bromide.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).