Air Showers are chambers or tunnels used to decontaminate personnel via air jets as they enter or exit a cleanroom. These showers are placed at the entrances of cleanrooms or other controlled environments to secure the biggest containment breach, minimizing the danger to workers or products.
An Air Shower is designed to function as a sort of gateway controller between your cleanroom and the rest of the world. When used properly, an air shower can cut down on a vast majority of potential contaminants and helps ensure that your product remains safe and uncontaminated. Today, air showers have become more common because of their benefits, and comparatively small price tag.
HOW DOES AN AIR SHOWER WORK
Essentially, air showers function as a high velocity, low pressure, self-contained system. The air shower, which is the actual high-velocity airflow fan, turns on once the employee is in the room, and the room itself, with dual locking doors, is called the air lock.
In a one-person air shower, the airlock has two doors that cannot be opened at the same time. The employee enters the room from the outside, the doors lock, and then the air shower begins blowing air in (flapping manner, or high velocity streams). These streams of air effectively scrub the employee of any lingering particulate, blowing them to the low-pressure side of the room. Typically, an employee will be cleaned for 4-8 seconds, and then will wait for an additional 2-4 seconds for the room to be purged of the contaminants. The second door, leading to the actual cleanroom will then be unlocked, allowing the employee contaminant free, to enter into the production area.
Most smaller cleanrooms equipped with an air shower simply implement a one-person air shower, but cleanroom air showers do exist for many employees at once. These larger air showers are built kind of like tunnels and are beneficial for operations that have a shift change of 30 or more employees at a time.
WHO BENEFITS FROM USING AN AIR SHOWER
If you are in the following applications, an air shower can save you thousands and thousands of dollars in mistakes and contaminated product.
- Aerospace
- Nanotechnology
- Biotech
- Biomedical
- Microelectronics
- Precision manufacturing
- Pharmaceutical
No matter the cleanroom application, an air shower is guaranteed to decrease particulate and the presence of contaminants.
As a leader in Scientific Equipment Repair and Medical Equipment Calibrations, Scientific Instrument Center works with many corporations, universities, and hospitals providing the highest level of laboratory services.
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