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Cleanroom Flooring Systems
Clean rooms are highly sophisticated buildings that fulfill crucial functions for highly sensitive processes. Clean room design and construction is now a special segment of the building industry and accounts for the specification and installation of an ever increasing amount of interior surface finish material. A clean room is a specialized enclosure that establishes an environmentally controlled space where airborne particles, microbes, temperature, humidity, airflow, and other elements are carefully regulated. Clean rooms are no longer used just in the aerospace industry. Today clean rooms are built wherever contamination control is important: pharmaceutical and medical technology labs and production areas; semiconductor, computer, and communication system assembly and testing facilities; optical, biotechnology, food and drink processing plants.
Understanding Moisture Problems
The most dreaded words a flooring contractor can say to a client are “you have a moisture problem.” In laymen’s terms a moisture problem means that water vapor is passing from the ground below the building through the concrete subflooring. These vapors combine with the chemistry of concrete and over time will destroy and undermine the bond between flooring materials and concrete. Unfortunately, this type of moisture is not visible in the formof a puddle of water on the floor.
ESD Flooring in an Operational Cleanroom
MANY FACILITY PLANNERS, concerned about contamination or potential scheduling delays, once dismissed the thought of installing electrostatic discharge (ESD) safe tile in operational clean spaces. Rather than risk tearing their buildings apart and losing valuable production time, many companies chose alternative methods to ESD flooring to be ANSI/ESD S20.20-1999 compliant. ESD industry control practices may include the combination of wrist straps, grounding cords, floor mats and “Faraday Cage” material handling protocols. Until recently, installing a new ESD floor most often included the difficult taskof removing the old floor first.
Reasons for Installing ESD Flooring
Let us start with the reasons why a functioning cleanroom facility manager might want or need to replace a floor. Regardless of the issues involved, one does not replace an existing floor unless it is absolutely necessary. Floors are only replaced when the existing flooring, usually a seamless epoxy or tile, becomes incompatible with ongoing needs. In a cleanroom or cleanmanufacturing facility, there are four main reasons why this happens:
ESD Flooring Options for Cleanrooms
In any of the four replacement scenarios above, before any serious plans are made or dismissed, it makes sense to start with a broad evaluation of various ESD flooring alternatives. Any thoughtful evaluation should begin with an investigation involving process compatibility, and then an examination of the risks/rewards of installing a new floor based on successfully dealing with obstacles such as shutdowns, equipment movement, loss of production, contamination, odor containment and other considerations. At this point it is usually advisable to create a decision matrix or at least give a cursory glance at ESD flooring solutions. Of course most of the options will be quickly dismissed based on contamination control parameters or unsatisfactory electrical properties (point to point resistance, and resistance to a groundable point).Below is a reasonable list of possible flooring materials:
Maintaining Cleanroom Equipment
Stringent standards and safety protocols are put in place to ensure that products manufactured and inspected in cleanrooms will not pose any hazards to the end user.
