Cleanroom Industry Standards

Cleanroom Industry Standards

Cleanrooms are essential to any manufacturing process where particulate contamination can affect the quality of goods produced. Cleanrooms provide secure environments with controlled air filtration, lowering the possibility of product contamination or large particulate interference with critical process manufacturing. Cleanrooms are used in industries such as medical device manufacturing, food processing, computer manufacturing and server holding, military and aerospace research and life sciences as well as thousands of other potential applications.

Cleanroom standards are classified according to the number and size of particles permitted per volume of air in a specific amount of time. Clean Air Products engineers can provide guidelines for the class of cleanroom required. Typically, businesses and organizations are aware of their cleanroom performance requirements because of customer, industry or government specification. For example, government regulation USP 797 outlines specific requirements for pharmaceutical product manufacturing.

Clean room industry requirements are classified according to ISO 14644-5:2004 which specifies basic requirements for cleanroom operations. Federal Standard 209E is still also used.

ISO cleanroom classifications are rated according to how much particulate of specific sizes exist per cubic meter. The "cleanest" cleanroom is a class 1 and the "dirtiest" a class 9. Each clean room is rated by ISO class. This cleanroom standard rating system provides the necessary information to make an informed decision based on your product needs. Most clean rooms fall into the class 6,7, or 8 categories.