What’s a cleanroom?
A cleanroom is designed to allow manufacturers to control particulate contamination, temperature, humidity, and other potential variables, consequently protecting the product or manufacturing process from air or human borne contaminants.
What are the sources and causes of contamination in a cleanroom?
Depending on the product or manufacturing process, there is a wide range of contaminant levels as you go down the scale of particle sizes considered to be contaminants. Contamination is typically derived from four main sources:
- Facilities
- People
- Tools
- Indirect Materials
A facility can cause contamination through walls, floors, ceilings, paint, debris, and leakage from the HVAC system, static electricity, or even furniture fittings.
General human activity can create contamination from skin flakes, oil, fluid, cosmetic debris, perfume, lint fibers, and other particles that attach to clothing and hair.
The tools and machinery used to make the products produced in a cleanroom manufacturing environment can create particles from friction and general wear.
Just like in a non-cleanroom manufacturing facility, heavy machinery can emit lubricant, vibrations, and (depending on the job the machine is doing), release particles into the air from the manufacturing process.
In addition to the above, there are general office agents that create concern for contamination. Cleaning chemicals, packaging materials, brooms, mops, dusters, tape, and more can introduce potentially harmful contaminants as well.
How does this affect the business bottom line?
Contamination can be devastating to ROI. It can lead to product damage, recalls, expensive investigations, production downtime, and other consequences.
Cleanrooms ensure that all the potential contamination possibilities are removed from, and kept outside of the cleanroom environment. However, you still have to level the machines in a cleanroom, just like machines in any other manufacturing setting. Typical leveling products are made with materials that create contamination and are not suitable for cleanrooms.
Most leveling wedges are cast iron. Why does this create issues for cleanrooms?
The surface of a product, like a computer chip, for example, has to be extremely clean to fit so many small transistors on it, which is how we get higher and faster processing power in phones that keep getting smaller! If particles from cast iron leveling wedges become airborne they can easily land on the surface of these tiny chips and create contamination. Sometimes the particles can even be larger than the transistors on the chips – that’s how small the particles cleanrooms attempt to keep out are engineered to account for.
Cast iron leveling wedges create more issues specifically, because cast iron is more porous than other materials and the sliding surfaces of the wedge cannot be coated. This allows oxidation to occur and create greater opportunity for contamination.
What wedges or feet can be used in cleanroom manufacturing environments?
Don’t worry, there ARE leveling options for cleanroom! Unlike cast iron, stainless steel leveling feet can be cleaned with materials that don’t emit particles. For wedges, aluminum is a great cleanroom option. Engineered with a special hard coated surface, Aluminum wedges use stainless steel screws and grease that is specially formulated for cleanroom applications.
