Abstract
The ISO 14644 family of cleanroom standards has been at the center of international cleanroom standards development for many years and covers most facets of cleanroom activity and cleanroom types from large ballroom cleanrooms to isolators and clean tunnels. The series is under constant review and is still expanding.
Recent documents that have been released concern the quantification of airborne and surface chemical concentrations, nanoparticles and the selection and testing of equipment used within these rooms. However, apart from some misleading information in the original Part 4 design document, questions concerning the energy demands from air purification processing have been overlooked. Nationally, institutions such as the BSI in UK, DIN- VDI in Germany and IEST in the USA have produced limited information on the topic, but Part 16 is the first standard to be internationally agreed upon.
The key new features of the standard are a) the preparation of an accurate User Requirement Specification (URS), b) a practical method for estimating the volume of supply air needed to maintain the specified ISO room classifications in operation, c) tuning and d) benchmarking. An informative annex develops three useful metrics for benchmarking: power intensity for contamination removal (PICR), fan energy intensity for contamination removal (EICR) and energy intensity (EI).
About the Author
Dick Gibbons, CEng, IMechE, FSEE, has an extensive career in contamination control and processing of cleanroom product. He has been a major contributor to the work of BSI LBI/30 for many years and is currently convenor of ISO TC 209 Working Group 8 that has produced both ISO 14644-8:2013 - Part 8: Classification of air cleanliness by chemical concentration (ACC) and ISO 14644-10:2013 - Part 10: Classification of surface cleanliness by chemical concentration. He was also the UK technical expert on ISO TC 209 Working Group 9 which produced ISO 14644-9:2012 - Part 9: classification of surface cleanliness by particle concentration. Having chaired the sub-committee of LBI/30 which produced BS 8568:2013 on cleanroom energy efficiency, he was appointed convenor of ISO Working Group 13 that wrote ISO 14644-16: 2019 on cleanroom energy reduction.
