Displaying items by tag: cleaning

Elevated floor system, which is also termed as access floor system, is a raised structural floor that is placed on a reinforced concrete slab. The elevated floor system consists of a several panels, as shown in Figure-1, which are installed on vertical adjustable pedestals as it can be noticed in Figure-2. The pedestals are fixed on the concrete slab using suitable means for instance adhesives or mechanical fixings.

In most cases, a data center’s under floor is also its air plenum.  Not cleaning beneath a raised floor can result in contaminants being drawn into sensitive computer equipment, which can cause overheating and shorten their life.

It's worse than cleaning out the garage. It's cramped, stuff is piled and tangled everywhere, and what's worse, a lot of it is alive! And like a bunch of snakes, you're afraid that if you touch something, it will bite -- only this "bite" might be an outage that could cost you your job.

If you have a cleanroom, you need to take care of your HVAC. Here are 5 checkpoints to keep you running efficiently and economically.

While the advanced air filtration systems in modern cleanroom HVACs trap most dust particles, cross contamination from dust is still a concern. Dense dust, which has high water content, and metal-containing dust can easily find its way into cleanrooms via things like the corrosion of faucets and plumbing or technician clothing. A careful protocol is necessary to remove these dust particles and avoid spreading contaminates during cleaning.

The professional cleaning industry is changing more and evolving faster today than at any other time in its history. While this is happening, the majority of cleaning contractors are so busy with their day-to-day business operations, they may not see even more changes coming right around the corner. 

Ron Segura, president of Segura Associates, one of the industry's leading cleaning consultants working with both cleaning contractors and facility managers, says to deal with these changes, we must take steps now to "future-proof" our businesses. 

Today, when most of us purchase a new electronic device, just about whatever it is, the first thing we do is take it out of the box, plug it in, and start it going. No reading manuals; no watching instruction videos; if a quick start-up guide is included, maybe we’ll take a look at it.

The problem with this plug-and-play mentality is that we can pay a high price for it. We typically do not reference the manual until something goes wrong. Very often at that point, we find out the problem we are now facing could have been avoided with proper equipment maintenance practices — what started out as a minor equipment issue has now become a major repair cost.

When it comes to cleaning equipment, the high price that managers of controlled environments may pay can be very high indeed. This is why they must stress that their cleaning professionals, whether in-house or contracted, properly maintain their cleaning tools. For instance, if airborne dust is released from a poorly maintained vacuum cleaner, it can damage work areas and experiments. Poorly maintained floor machines can do the same as well as possibly damage the floor’s finish or the floor itself. The point is this: plug-and-play is great, and a time saver; but disregard plug-and-maintain when it comes to cleaning equipment at your own peril.

To help cleaning professionals and administrators avoid these pitfalls, below are some common equipment maintenance issues often included in the owner’s manual that get lost in our plug-and-play world.

In terms of cleanliness, the manufacturing space was design to meet ISO 7 classification in at rest condition. Entry and exit points were specified at air changes per hour that met ISO 7 requirements for this non-sterile drug product. The air change rate in the gowning rooms was set higher to promote particle capture at entry and exit points. The corridors were clean but not classified or CNC. A transition zone occurred inside the gowning room to take into account the movement between the CNC space and the ISO 7 area, as depicted in the image below. This transitional zone was physically demarked by a step-over bench that separated the clean side from the dirty side. Gowning at the entry point was downed at a level that was prescribed by the user as part of the administrative protocols to minimize both introduction of particles and cross contamination of the API from external sources. For this facility, people entering the manufacturing area from the CNC corridor downed a second layer of gowning (the first layer was downed at the entrance to the CNC space). People moving from one production suite to the next needed to follow gowning protocols at each entry and exit point.

Cleanrooms are highly controlled manufacturing areas designed to limit the amount of contamination. Federal standard 209E classifies cleanrooms by the concentration of air particles 0.5 micron in diameter or larger. (An average human hair is about 50 microns in diameter.)

A Class 1000 cleanroom, for example, has fewer than 1000 of these particles in a cubic foot of air, while a Class 10 cleanroom has fewer than 10 particles less than or equal to 0.5 micron in diameter per cubic foot.

As the global appetite for sending and receiving voice, data and video continues to increase, networks will need to become more powerful and more efficient to keep pace.

In turn, optical networks require optical switch systems that directly route multi-wavelength photonic signals between thousands of different destinations, or ports. Recent estimation of the worldwide market for optical switch systems is forecasted to grow from $234 million in 2000 to $7.4 billion by 2004.

The healthy projections have yielded many new facilities, and a Southern California based company recently completed a fab for the production of micro electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) optical switches, the basis for communication over a telecommunications network.