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

Product Spotlight – Automated Medical Cleaning System

Posted on by Jim Patterson

The Problem

You may wonder, how did the Automated Medical Cleaning come about?  A major medical device manufacturer was having a huge fall out and poor yields in it’s manufacturing that result in what are called tear downs in the industry. Basically, their process was to perform 100% visual inspection for Particulate Matter (PM) inside of a sealed tray that housed the medical devices they manufactured.  The device has a lid stock that is heat sealed into place. When they see a particle inside of the finished tray, they put that tray aside as a reject. At some point after the manufacturing, they tear open the rejected trays, which means lots of additional labor, discarding the package, re-cleaning the product and the new packaging materials and re-packaging the product.

The Solution

The aforementioned medical device customer of Static Clean, purchased one of our manual medical cleaning systems and ran 50,000 parts with zero tear downs. An operator now simply passes the trays under a pair of cleaning hoods that are integrated into one of our work stations. It proved so successful that they ended up ordering a dozen of our manual medical cleaning systems. To further enhance the efficiency, the throughput, and to take any human error out of the equation a customer asked if we could provide an automated system that transported their trays and products through the cleaning zone.  After some work with our Engineering teams, we created the automated medical cleaning system.  Now the Automated Medical Cleaning System is gaining wide acceptance in the Medical Device manufacturing community.

 

Static Clean International’s (SCI) Medical Cleaning System with Automated Shuttle (MCS-AS) provides all the benefits of the MCS system – an effective, efficient, time-proven system for cleaning products / packaging, source capturing particulates in critical medical device manufacturing and packaging processes – and elevates it to a whole new level.

SCI’s Medical Device Manufacturer and Packaging customers, many you rely on for health care products, have enjoyed over a decade of reduced tear-down, better quality, higher yields and profits using our MCS system.  Previously only available in a manual-feed system, SCI proudly introduces our new MCS-AS with automated shuttle for complete control over the cleaning process for optimal, repeatable results.  By incorporating a speed-adjustable pneumatic or servo-electric slide with stainless steel nest, custom fit to your packaging-trays, your operator simply places a tray, loaded with your product, into the nest, touching the Opto-Touch button to begin the cleaning cycle.  The MCS-AS shuttles the nest at a controlled speed through the cleaning zone where static bars and stainless steel air tubes provide compressed, ionized air to neutralize static charges on the trays/parts, stripping particulates off surfaces, nooks & crannies.

Once airborne, particles in the cleaning zone are captured via the Medical Cleaning System – Automated Shuttle (MCS-AS) dust collector which draws a powerful vacuum, high velocity air from the cleaning zone, conveying the contaminants into the vacuum slot of the stainless steel hoods.  The particles are captured in the dust collector’s internal filtration, gently delivering clean air back into the clean room through a HEPA filtered exhaust.

Integral safety features E-stop the system if an obstruction is encountered, exerting more than 3~5 lbs. of force along the shuttles path, easily reset with the push of a button once the obstruction is cleared.  Power to the static bars and compressed air to the air tubes at the cleaning hoods are controlled by the systems PLC, turning on only during a cleaning cycle, significantly reducing energy costs.

An anodized aluminum profile frame provides a sturdy foundation for the system, supporting the dust collector and all components in a sleek, clean package.  Locking swivel casters, a quick-connect compressed air fitting and a standard 120V plug make moving the MCS-AS easy within your facility.

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.

Remember the Van de Graaff Generator?

Posted on by Jim Patterson

The Van de Graaff generator was invented in 1929 by American physicist Robert J. Van de Graaff. That’s a great fact, but why did he invent such a contraption?

Flashback to Science Class 

Van de Graaff began experiments to find methods to accelerate particles at very high speeds in order to disintegrate atomic nuclei. We’ve all seen these generators with the aluminum dome on top of a long pole in science class, and if not, we’ve certainly heard about them. Is that what we were doing in science class? Trying to accelerate particles and not just create lightning?

When we were young, we thought it was cool to receive and give people static shocks. When belts made of silk rotate on small motors, they create friction, and therefore static electricity. The belts in proximity to the hollow metal domes are insulated from a ground reference. The charged metal domes can store enough energy to produce a visible discharge, but the current is typically very low. Table top versions of the Van de Graaff generator, as used in science experiments, can reach between 200,000 and 500,000 volts.

Time for a Field Trip? 

The largest Van de Graaff generator in the world, built by its inventor in 1930, is on permanent display at Boston’s Museum of Science. This 15-foot diameter sphere stands atop a 22-foot tall column and has the capability of generating 2,000,000 volts. Three or four times a day, the techs at the museum demonstrate how it works. As the generator reaches its peak, it produces sparks, lightning and makes hair stand up. The science techs stand inside the caged dome, which demonstrates lightning. Also, a 20 minute display teaches those in attendance about conductors, insulators, electricity, magnetism and storm safety.

The Dangers of Van de Graaff Generators

It is important to note that Van de Graaff machines, even the table top science lab units, can generate enough energy to stop a pacemaker and destroy sensitive electronic gadgets such as cell phones, laptops and personal computers. Make sure that during experimentation, precautions are taken to keep these devices away from the field of energy that is created by the generators. It is not recommended for children under the age of nine.
Static electricity is a threat that can cause many problems. A whole industry of static control equipment and materials has spawned from the ill effects of electrostatic fields and electrostatic discharge. If you have a static problem, please contact Static Clean and we will offer the best recommendations to keep you and your products safe.