The Clean Room
I posted a link last Friday to a story about a class 10,000 rating "clean room." Here's an excerpt:That means any cubic foot of air in the clean room has no more than 10,000 particles floating around in it larger than 0.5 microns.
How small it that? A micron is one-millionth of a meter, and typical “outside” air has millions of such particles. (A human hair is between 20 and 200 microns wide.) If an inch ballooned to the size of the Empire State Building, a 0.5-micron bit of dust would still be smaller than a penny on the sidewalk.This week I received an e-mail from a source who (for employment-related reasons) wishes to remain anonymous:
You mention the class 10k clean room and while the one in my area isn’t that large, I’ve been in one. I regularly go in a very large 100k clean room (in which the 10k room actually resides) and a 50k room.
Contrary to what you might think, the requirements for going in there aren’t actually that bad. This varies between clean rooms but mine are particularly careful, so some have less requirements than this. At 100k, you need a clean room lab coat, a bouffant (essentially a hair net), a beard cover if you have any facial hair, and to clean your shoes on a sticky mat and shoe brush thingy. At 50k, you need shoe covers, a jumpsuit, and head cover (the ones with the beard cover make you look like a white ninja, seriously). At 10k, it’s basically the same thing but now there’s a certain procedure for tucking layers into each other and with or without a beard your whole face except for your eyes are covered. There’s no full on sealed suit like you see in movies with biological stuff or whatever. Also, this is completely random and more than a bit childish, but whenever I’m in there I always wonder if I’m contaminating something every time I fart.Great. Now I'm wondering that, too.
He also sent in some links:
typical 100k coat and bouffant
(this link removed by request)
white ninja
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