Controlled Turbulence in the Clean Room

Posted on by Jim Patterson

Most Clean Room experts and consultants cringe at the thought of having turbulence inside of a clean room or clean space even though it is a necessary evil. Compressed air driven ionizing guns and nozzles are indeed a requirement to get rid of particles in the process, on the product itself and worse yet inside of the package.  Particles typically show up after heat sealing the lid in place. How do you make a process cleaner and reduce waste without the use of ionizers that use compressed, Clean Dry Air (CDA) or Nitrogen (N2)? The simple answer is that you go with whatever blow-off device is required, but control the turbulence.

What does turbulence have to do with a Clean-room, you might ask?  Unlike laminar air flow, turbulent air flow is not channeled in smooth parallel paths but distorted or agitated.  Typically this dilutes the contamination but it can also distribute it across the whole clean-room.  Wikipedia’s definition of a clean room is this; 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.

The basic problem associated with the use of turbulent air tools is “where do the particles go”? The answer is quite simple; source capture the debris where it is being created. With the right containment equipment in place, the dislodged particles can be drawn into a filter media that greatly reduces the risk of re-contaminating the products just cleaned or dumping the particles on the nearby manufacturing cell. The hotspots where particles are created may be at the molding machines, ultrasonic welding stations, de-burring, assembly, packaging or other points of friction where static is generated.

The best solution for companies dealing with these problems, especially the applications that involve medical packagers is to incorporate an ionizer into the source capturing equipment or use ionizing in conjunction with a means to capture the debris. Static Clean can offer both solutions. If you are using an ionizing air gun to remove particles, it only makes sense to use the Particle Trap® to capture those particles.   If the same problems apply and the desire is to take human error out of the equation, the answer is to use a Medical or Parts Cleaning Station that we offer in both manual and automated models. View the details about the Particle Trap® 6000 and our Medical Cleaning Stations-MCS-AS.

Guns and Nozzles

Posted on by Jim Patterson

I see my life in terms of music

Being a big music enthusiast, running jam sessions in the barn behind our house and working in the static business always has me thinking of cool names to call our jam band.   The band is made up of four people from our company, Static Clean International and other invited guests. Then it hit me, we will call our band “Guns and Nozzles”.

In our lineup of static control products, some of the key tools to deal with static electricity and particle contamination problems are ionizing air guns and ionizing air nozzles.

Simply stated, they use compressed air or nitrogen to blow off debris and the ionizing components inside of the units make sure that the particles are not reattached back onto the newly cleaned substrate. The latest edition to the ionizing air tools is the Zapp Plus, which features a controller, a sensor eye, a goose-neck for flexibility, a built-in piezoelectric transformer and a fault detector to warn of power supply problems.

Without deviation progress is not possible-Frank Zappa

The Zapp Plus has gained wide acceptance for use with our Particle Trap® 6000, a source capture systems that collects the particles once removed from optics, medical devices, thermoformed trays and any product that requires cleanliness. The Particle Trap® 6000 was developed with a guy named Frank and as corny as it sounds, we’ve thought about calling the product the Frank Zappa. Of course that was never really going to happen, but who can argue with genius of the real Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.

Guns and nozzles

Every Opportunity is an Opportunity

Posted on by Jim Patterson

Sir Winston Churchill, as Prime Minister of Britain was faced with the daunting task of leading his country from the brink of defeat to victory. He is noted for many quotes and speeches around 1940 including “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat, and “We Will Fight on the Beaches” but none is more famous than the “This Was Their Finest Hour” speech to the House of Commons on June 16, 1940 just one month after he became Prime Minister. He is also credited with the following quote along with many others.

“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”  -Winston Churchill

Is your glass half-full?

Another way of describing people’s attitude in life is the difference between the glass is half empty full vs. the glass is half empty. Churchill, born in 1874 had a good genetic combination that made him the right choice to lead the United Kingdom at a very difficult time in history, especially with Europe under siege by Hitler’s forces. He was a military man who had a British statesman father and a New York born, independent thinking, socialite mother. This combination brought him to the forefront as the right man at the right time in history for not only the British people, but for Europe and the world.

In business, we all want to be optimist and not dwell on the things that are wrong or business that we lost to China or more to the point, complaining about things out of our control. We need to focus on the positive and what we do well to be competitive in the Global Economy. If Churchill hadn’t maintained a healthy attitude and rallied the troops to save his county, what do you think the end result would have been? The landscape of Europe would look much different today. President Roosevelt and Churchill though very much different in so many ways, found a way to work together. Many people believe that the government work programs of the New Deal was the key to our vital economy and getting out of the Great Depression, but it was more about the destruction of the infrastructure in of so many countries including Europe and Japan that made America the strongest economy in the world.

Attitude is everything

The United States with its raw materials and a ready and willing; post- war workforce was up for the challenge. By 1944, the unemployment rate in the US was 1.2%, still the lowest in American history. Even with our military personnel returning from the war, the unemployment rate stayed under 4% throughout the 1940’s. You can see why panic sets in when the US unemployment rate get above 8%. The population of the US in 1944 was less than 140 million people and in 2014, it is 317 million. The math shows a clear picture of our country moving in the wrong direction. How do we turn things around? I asked a very liberal friend the other day a simple question. If you had to pay $10.00 more for a pair of sneakers made in the USA instead of a plant in Asia, would you? His answer was absolutely not and he justified it by saying that it was his job to get the best price possible. If we had a level playing field it might be different, but the US tax burden and regulatory compliance means higher costs to produce goods. Notwithstanding the attitude of my misguided friend, there is a huge under swell of buy American sentiment going on and many companies that went to China are moving manufacturing back to the States. We won’t get it all back, but we will see better days ahead. The bright spot in our manufacturing sector is Medical Device Manufacturing and Static Clean with its key products such as Hepa-Clean Chambers and Medical Cleaning Stations is seeing the benefits from every opportunity presented. Visit us at Static Clean for information on our products. Our hope is for more Americans to think globally, but act locally and hasten the return of American entrepreneurship.

Cleanrooms: Controlled Environments

Posted on by Jim Patterson

In a manufacturing environment, complete sterilization is more important than you might think.

A cleanroom is a controlled environment where products are manufactured, typically found in electronics, bio-pharmaceutical, medical device and pharmaceutical industries. Clean-rooms are planned and manufactured using strict protocols. Did you know that a particle 200 times smaller than a human hair could cause a major disaster in a cleanroom?

In order to keep that environment sterilized, contaminants that are developed due to people, processes, equipment or facilities need to be controlled to specific limits. Airborne contamination must be continually removed which impacts factors such as air flow rates, pressurization, temperature, humidity and filtration.

There are four principles which apply to the control of airborne contamination in cleanrooms, but we believe there should be a fifth principle added to that list.

The four recognized principles are:

  • Filtration: Cleanrooms need to be designed so that most of the contamination in the air is filtered out.
  • Dilution: Cleanrooms need to be supplied with a sufficient volume of fresh air at regular intervals so that any contamination generated by people working in the room is first diluted and then removed from the room. This is achieved by having a set number of air changes per hour. The minimum requirement is normally twenty air-changes per hour (that is the room air volume is replaced every three minutes).
  • Directional Air Flow: For ultra-clean activities undertaken in unidirectional airflow cabinets operating at EU and WHO Grade A (ISO class 5), the air needs to move in a straight direction so that any contamination generated within the area is removed. This is achieved by having the air enter at a high velocity (normally at 0.45 meters per second ±20%).
  • Air Movement: The air within a cleanroom needs to keep moving so that any contamination remains suspended in the air rather than being allowed to settle onto surfaces. This is achieved by having unidirectional or turbulent airflow.

The fifth principle we would add to this list would be ionization. Adding ionization to the air coming into the rooms or at various workstations where people and plastics are part of the process…and the problem. Ionization will help to dislodge particles, keep particles airborne and reduce static levels on plastics that will prevent the attraction of contaminants.

Preventing any contaminants from entering a clean-room requires a commitment, but the importance should not be underestimated. Follow strict procedures and guidelines for entering and cleaning clean rooms to ensure that your product is not compromised! Check out some of our products to help keep your cleanroom up to the highest standards.