A clean room in your house? Quite contrary, a cleanroom is much more than that. A cleanroom is a contained space where the air is “scrubbed” or “highly filtered.” Cleanrooms can be found in many industries for various processes that demand critically clean spaces. They are often found in manufacturing facilities for various types of products that demand critically clean processes. Cleanrooms create a controlled environment by reducing the particle contamination in the air and by the ability to control the temperature, humidity, and pressure of the cleanroom.
The Source of Cleanroom Contamination
What is contamination and where does it come from? Looking through the sun rays coming through your bedroom window, you can probably see the light reflecting off of all of the dust floating in the room. Where does the dust come from? Believe it or not, dust particles often contain dead human skin cells, pollen, and insect fecal matter. Needless to say, cleanrooms work really hard to remove these contaminants from the air, hence their extensive cleaning processes.
Particles are measured in the unit of microns, which is an extremely small unit of measure. To paint a picture of just how small a micron is, the diameter of a single strand of hair is the size of about 80-100 microns. Humans can see particles 50-60 microns and bigger, but any particle smaller than that is invisible to the naked eye. Scrubbing the air is literally to wash it clean, which is done through special air filters, designed specifically for cleanrooms, which can filter particles as small as .3 microns. So, needless to say, these filters could come in handy for those dust particles that you see and don’t see in your bedroom.
Cleanrooms are complex spaces, requiring numerous high levels of cleanliness and control. Knowing the basics of what makes a cleanroom a cleanroom is always helpful, but what else is there to know? We can take you further into why each cleanroom is controlled at the level it is through the explanation of ISO cleanroom standards, the classification system that determines the level of contamination control for each cleanroom. Want to learn more? Stay tuned for our cleanroom classification guide, coming soon!
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