Displaying items by tag: cleanroom

Hardwall cleanrooms provide a rigid wall structure and a completely enclosed cleanroom with air vents to exhaust air. These cleanrooms hold higher pressure differentials, which is important to provide differing cleanliness levels in different areas. Negative and positive/negative pressure cleanroom designs require hardwall cleanrooms, as do A/C and humidity control cleanrooms.

A cleanroom provides a controlled, isolated environment for handling contamination-sensitive substances or for protecting the exterior environment from dangerous substances in the controlled area. The density of sub-micron and larger airborne particle contamination inside a cleanroom is kept within tightly controlled limits by forcing clean, filtered air into the cleanroom.

Below is a list of general regulations recommended as a minimum for the successful operation of a cleanroom. All professional cleaning personnel should be aware and follow these regulations at all times.

Cleanrooms are classified according to the number and size of particles permitted per volume of air. Large numbers like "class 100" or "class 1000" refer to FED-STD-209E, and denote the number of particles of size 0.5 µm or larger permitted per cubic foot of air. The standard also allows interpolation, so it is possible to describe, for example, "class 2000".

Cleanrooms maintain particulate-free air through the use of either HEPA or ULPA filters employing laminar or turbulent air flow principles. Laminar, or unidirectional, air flow systems direct filtered air downward or in horizontal direction in a constant stream towards filters located on walls near the cleanroom floor or through raised perforated floor panels to be recirculated.

Cleanrooms can be very large. Entire manufacturing facilities can be contained within a cleanroom with factory floors covering thousands of square meters. They are used extensively in semiconductor manufacturing, biotechnology, the life sciences, and other fields that are very sensitive to environmental contamination.

A cleanroom or clean room is an environment, typically used in manufacturing or scientific research, with a low level of environmental pollutants such as dust, airborne microbes, aerosol particles, and chemical vapors. More accurately, a cleanroom has a controlled level of contamination that is specified by the number of particles per cubic meter at a specified particle size.