Sometimes the smallest parts are the trickiest to clean. At Static Clean our customers often bring us size challenging parts and devices to work on. Until recently no one in our industry has been able to address these challenges. Static Clean has now developed a method using our Medical Cleaning Station and Medical Cleaning Station-AS cleaning benches to batch clean these small part products. We have a Stainless Steel sieve that is fed through the upper and lower hoods that are part of our MCS line. We had a potential customer from New Jersey who was amazed at how well it worked. Before he arrived, he went to a Michael’s store with his daughter and bought all kinds of colorful glitter that you would use for arts and crafts. He used the glitter to contaminate the white caps that you see in the video. It was overkill but a very good test. The white caps that you see here go on the top of things such as suspension bottles, eye drop bottles, contact lens cleaning bottles etc. If they have particles, plastic bits, human hair or any foreign matter, it could be the cause of a health problem. Our batch cleaning system worked so well that he has said he is interested in purchasing not one but two MCS Systems and commented that “it worked better than I ever anticipated”.
For more information on our MCS or MCS-AS Cleaning benches, contact our technical sales department today.
Last week I went to Toronto to attend a “Bell Ringing Ceremony”. Before I received the phone call invite from my niece who has been battling a cancerous brain tumor, I hadn’t heard of this particular event. Here is the back story. Cancer patients are subjected to 30 straight days of Radiation and Chemotherapy on an outpatient basis. In the hallway, outside of the treatment rooms mounted on the wall is a brass “Celebration Bell”. At the end of the treatment period, the family and friends of the patient meet at the hospital and help their loved ones “Ring the Bell”.
Next to the bell was a plaque that had the following saying.
“Ring this bell three times well – Its sound to clearly say – My treatment is done – This course is run – And I am on my way”.
Static Treatment
Before I went into the Juravinski Cancer Center in Hamilton Ontario, I sat on a park bench near the entrance to the lobby and watched patients come and go. Many struggled on their way into the center, but more seemed to struggle after their rigorous treatments. It was a very sad, moving and thought provoking experience. However, it got me to thinking about cancer treatments and whether the day will come when there are less invasive methods to treat cancer, the number one killer in the world. Back in Boston, I did a little research and found out that static electricity, which is considered as part of Natural Medicine is in consideration and going through clinical trials, especially in Japan. Of course!!!
The thought behind using static electricity is nothing new to the medical community. In the Reading Eagle newspaper, dated September 2, 1951, a retired military surgeon by the name of Colonel Francis Usher suggested the use of static electricity as a possible new cancer treatment. His premise was that it would enhance existing treatments and possibly slow the growth or kill the cancer cells.
Back to the Future
Fast forward 60 years and many articles can now be found on using static electricity in the treatment of cancer and clinical trials are underway by a number or researchers. In a paper presented by Philip H. Gutin, MD, and Eric T. Wong, MD, they wrote about Tumor Treatment Fields (TTF) claiming that TTF treatment or an electric field has a superior safety profile, and its minor side effects do not seem to overlap with those of cytotoxic chemotherapies, targeted agents, or anti-angiogenesis drugs. Therefore, the rational combination of TTF therapy with specific pharmacological agents may enhance tumor cell death.
The definition of an electric field is attributed to Michael Faraday in the 1820s and was later formulated by James Clerk Maxwell in his electromagnetic theory in 1865. It is a field of electric forces that surround a source charge. When a test charge is placed within an electric field, a force acts on it because it is energy. By using a battery with a couple of wires on an AC or alternating current, tests are easy to conduct. Negative charges attract positive charges, while similar signed charges repel each other. Basically, two electrodes are placed at a given distance from each other on the human body in proximity to a tumor or cancerous cells. Voltage is applied and the energy travels from one electrode to the other and has an effect on the bad cells in its path. TTF therapy is now a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)–approved treatment for patients who have exhausted surgical and radiation treatments.
Obviously, much more needs to be done, but it certainly feels good to serve an industry that not only has a long history in solving static problems, but one that has a future in the Medical Treatment of Cancer. In the meantime, our Particle Trap® Cube is used to solve particle contamination problems in the packaging of Medical Devices that are utilized in hospitals and clinics.
Tempest Ionizing Air Blower and the Background on its Name
Webster’s Dictionary defines a Tempest as a windy storm or a disturbance. When static electricity is present, especially on products assembled in electronics or medical device manufacturing facilities, it takes a disturbance to break the forces of static attraction of particles and electrostatic discharge (esd). Static Clean is excited to introduce the Tempest Ionizing Air Blowerused in work stations where static sensitive devices are handled.
TEMPEST is also a National Security Agency specification and NATO certification to protect the USA from leaks of information via spying by such methods as radio and electrical signals, sounds and vibrations. The bottom line on either Tempest is that the goal is to protect sensitive materials.
The Tempest Ionizing Air Blower uses a fan to induce ambient air past energized emitter pins to deliver ionized air to the desired location. The airflow is regulated by a speed control whereby the ionized air can be either gentle or more aggressive simply by changing the fan speed position. The unit includes a replaceable filter to clean the air that enters the fan. It also has an emitter point cleaner, built into the front shroud, making maintenance simple. As a comfort factor, the Tempest also includes a heater with its own on/off switch. Integrated into the Tempest is the electronics required to create a balanced stream of positive and negative ions.
In the world of micro-electronics and the trend towards miniaturization, I don’t think we can put the Genie back in the bottle. We seem to be driven to pack the maximum amount of goodies into the smallest of spaces. When we use smart phones, and other digital devices we tend to hold them closer to our eyes than we would a book or magazine. The reality, according to a 2011 study by Dr. Mark Rosenfield of the New York School of Optometry, is that when we use these small devices we blink less, causing a natural decrease in tear production, thus we get eye fatigue. Now think of the employees who have to actually assemble these small but sophisticated products or worse yet, watches. They have to keep a keen eye to the task at hand.
What is Swiss Made?
We’ve all seen the special headband-style magnifying glasses that jewelers use. They need to be able look into the tight confines of the watches, with all of their gears and moving parts. High quality watches are synonymous with claiming to have a Swiss Made Movement, but what does that actually mean? There are four rules in being able to claim Swiss Made Movement.
Must be 100% made in Switzerland.
60% of the overall value of the watch must be from Swiss Made Parts.
The watch movement must be encased in the outer case in Switzerland.
All quality control and inspections have to be done in Switzerland.
In an effort to maintain accurate movement of a Swiss Watch, it is important to make sure that it is free of particles or debris that can get into the wheels and gears. Static Clean offers the Piezonizer compact, lightweight, ANZ-SC3 Pencil Type Ionizer that delivers ionized air into the nooks and crannies to create a quality product while providing relief to the technicians who spend hours in assembly.
Tribo-Charging, Who Really Discovered Electricity?
The relationship between static electricity and particle attraction has been long known. The Ancient Greeks when polishing their jade and precious stones noticed that straw, chafe and other particles were attracted to the exact things they were trying to clean, the family jewels. This phenomena became known as “Tribo-charging“. Simply stated it was the contact and friction that generated an electrostatic field around the parts that attracted the debris.
The Plastic Attraction
In the Life Sciences Industry of today most companies use plastics in their process. Whether it is to replace body parts, catheters, injection systems, pumps, blood separators or their packing, plastics are here to stay. Not only are they here to stay, but plastic is being used in this process at an increasing rate. Most of these engineered plastics are for a specific need but the premise is the same, they generate huge amounts of static that causes Foreign Matter (FM) to be attracted to the products and the process.
Medical Device Manufacturers most often individually package each medical device and they are subjected to 100% inspection. When the inspector sees a speck of debris (FM), which could be in the form of plastic bits, fuzz balls from clothing, or even human hair, the package is then ripped open and put aside for repackaging. These units are tracked in what is generally called “the tear down rate”. In almost every case, the root cause was the forces of static electricity pulling unwanted particles onto the product and the packaging materials. In addition to the packaging level there are various stages in the assembly process where FM causes rejects. Some of those stages include Injection Molding, Coating, Ultrasonic Welding, Bonding/Gluing, Forming, and handling during the assembly processes. These are also key functions that need to be addressed. The common denominator being that contact and separation (tribo-charging) occurs, static is generated and FM comes into play to contaminate products that could end up inside the human body or blood stream. The FM could also potentially block injection or fluid systems clogging pathways designed to deliver medicine.
Gains are Being Made, Reducing FM
The front line of defense is a properly maintained clean room, but that doesn’t address process problems at the local level, aka the workstation or cell. How does static control reduce particles via ionization in the fight to reduce FM? Static Clean did a job last year for a major medical device company that was experiencing a very high tear down rate. They approached us to come up with a system where they could pass their products thru a blow-off, ionized, vacuum table. The results of this first system allowed them to run 50,000 parts without a single tear-down.
While not all medical device manufacturers have identical assembly lines, let’s take a look at the types of static controls are that implemented for specific reasons or points in the process.
Room Ionization: In this installation, ionizers are mounted in the ceilings and the preferred method is to locate the ionizer right under the Fan Filter Unit. (FFU) to take advantage of the clean air being delivered into the room.
The Increasingly popular approach has been to use source capturing methods in conjunction with ionizing air tools. Recent gains have been made in the development of customized medical cleaning workstations that meet clean room protocol and are tailor engineered to a specific product or package.
Who doesn’t like FM when it comes to listening to the radio? In the world of music, FM stands for Frequency Modulation, a method of broadcasting electrical signals. In a short blog, it is difficult to fully explain FM, but there are online tutorials and videos that explain how Frequency Modulation works in relationship to the amplitude and phase remaining constant, while the frequency is changed because of the signal input.
In the world of Medical and Pharma Packaging and Processing, FM has a totally different meaning. Foreign Matter (FM) is the cause of contamination, poor yields, rejects, rework and the total recall of products once in the field. The FM can be particles in the form of lint, clothing, skin flakes, hair, and dust. Another form of foreign matter particles are bits of plastic chips and slivers of angel hair which come from the plastic forming process, especially thermoforming.
The Life Sciences Industry as a whole spends huge sums of money to construct clean rooms that, by design, are supposed to keep foreign matter out of these processes. This assumes that the room is always operating at full efficiency, that humidity and temperature are being controlled, and that everything and everyone that enter the clean rooms are particle-free. That, of course, is not reality, especially if the clean room is not up to semiconductor level protocols, with strict adherence.
The Missing Equation
The missing part of this equation is ionization, whether passive or active, room type of systems or local ionization with source capturing abilities. Static electricity by nature not only attracts particles, but holds them securely to any plastic substrate. Plastics have been the widely used in the manufacturing of medical devices and their packaging is almost always some form of plastic that includes bags, pouches and molded trays. When you rub a balloon, you can pin it to the ceiling with static electricity. When a plastic part of a package generates static by handling, it has the ability to violate the process of keeping the environment Foreign Matter (FM) free.
That reminds me of the bridge in a Steely Dan hit and the line in the song goes like this, “FM –no static at all”.
If you want to reduce foreign matter (FM) and the root cause, “static”, Static Clean can get you to no static at all. Contact our tech sales team today and find out how we can assist you meet your goals.
The term “As the Crow Flies” has been found in print since as early as 1758. The term came from British coastal vessels that customarily carried a cage of crows. Crows detest large expanses of water and when released from a ship, they headed straight for dry land. This was very useful for sailors at sea who weren’t sure which direction they would find land. It was their form of radar long before radar was even invented as a standard navigational tool. The lookout perch on ships became known as the crow’s nest and a sailor would sit in the perch and note the direction the crow flew. Basically the crow instinctively knew the shortest distance between two points.
Clean Room Laminar Air Flow principles are based on the desired plan of air taking the most direct path from entrance to exit and extracting unwanted particles in that airflow to keep the clean room at a stated level of cleanliness. It has been long known that static electricity can influence the oceans of the world. Warm water meeting cold water, and each having different densities can create the tides that can even shape our shorelines.
You may ask, “What can influence the air patterns in clean rooms”? One of the biggest problems is the forces of static electricity which causes particle pull. Instead of the air taking that beeline or direct path, electro-statically charged plastics pull particles right out of the air flow and they become attracted to the plastic. If you are in the medical device manufacturing or packaging, these unwanted particles become the cause of poor yield, downtime, rework and lost revenue. The use of ionization in the air flow assists in delivering ions that reduce static levels on plastic materials. The ionization also helps to keep particles in the air flow for removal from the clean environment.
There are several key ionization tools that have been designed for use in laminar flow rooms and work stations. Static Clean offers the DC-ESR bar that mounts easily below a Fan Filter Unit and with its small profile does not obstruct the air pattern.
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.
“Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours”? Gordon Lightfoot
The real meaning behind the lyrics
There are many kinds of waves, but obviously the waves mentioned above by Gordon Lightfoot are from the song titled, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, about the iron ore ship tragedy on Lake Superior almost 39 years ago. A carrier ship called the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank during a bad storm on the lake in 1975. The severe winter storm was said to have hurricane force winds and waves that were 35 feet high. The sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald is one of the best-known disasters in the history of Great Lakes shipping. It got me thinking about all the different waves that we encounter in our everyday lives and the ones that we deal with at our company, Static Clean and how it all might be related. We normally think of the motion of a disturbance of water in a lake or the ocean as a wave. But, what about other mechanical waves, such as the stadium wave at a sporting event. One can image the fans following the shape of the water and it’s up and down movement. There are also light waves, sound waves and electromechanical waves, but the premise is the same. The displaced energy in all forms returns to its original position.
What does it have to do with Static Electricity?
In the efforts to control static electricity, the most common power supply to create ions on various neutralizing apparatus is done using a 60 Hz. AC sine wave. In this case the AC stands for Alternating Current and it is mostly related to a specific voltage that is required for ions to occur. The energy (sine wave cycle) goes between positive and negative and the swing time to complete the cycle is 1/60th of a second. That means that every 1/120th of second, it is either in positive or negative mode. Static electricity problems are when a material is charged either positively or negatively. The Static Clean Power supplies were designed to fight unwanted static electricity. Because of the design, they will put out energy, create bipolar ions and let nature take its course where opposites attract, thus cancelling out the static problem regardless of polarity.
How many ways can you call someone crazy? “What are you nuts, kooky, mad, silly, wacky, ape, psycho, bonkers, cracked, delirious, berserk, daft, demented or deranged and I really like fruity and out to lunch”? While the Oxford Dictionary describes it as a noun meaning: Mentally deranged, especially as manifested in a wild or aggressive way, we really don’t have the same intent when using crazy in conversation with friends and family.
The opposite to crazy is, calm, collected, rational, responsible, realistic, reasonable, sound and balanced. Can we be honest and agree that most of the time we are somewhere in the middle between these two extremes. Nobody can be totally calm, always rational, completely realistic, always responsible or perfectly balanced, but a happy medium makes life more interesting. Wouldn’t you agree?
When it comes to ionization, especially in electronics manufacturing, the goal is towards perfectly balanced static eliminators. There is no room for an ionizer to be out of balance or to produce more positive than negative ions. Such a state of imbalance can cause early failure of electronics boards or assemblies or create a situation called “walking wounded”. This simply means that harm has been done in the form of static electricity discharge (esd) to the device that may cause a latent product failure. It could be a TV, stereo or any electronics widget that uses sensitive electronics components in it design that is impacted by the esd event. Many Static Clean ionizers such as our Sentinel Blower meet or exceeds the ESD standard for balance.
In life it is also good to strike a happy balance. Call me crazy, but then again aren’t we all?
