What You Should Know About the Air Distribution Products Used Inside Both
Industries requiring the use of pressurized cleanrooms are widely varied, but all must meet specific criteria to reach cleanroom classifications to protect everything inside and out, including patients, doctors, and pharmaceutical products.
Cleanrooms are often pressurized, and depending on how, the air moves differently in space. Both positive and negative pressure are common in cleanrooms around the globe. Specialized critical environment solutions within air distribution products play a key role in keeping them operable and preventing the transmission of particulates.
What You Need to Know About Cleanroom Air Pressure
Air naturally flows from high to low pressure. When air moves in one direction, it does not also return the opposite direction, as long as one side remains pressurized.
Cleanrooms work with both positive and negative air pressure, depending on the goals of your critical environment. A clean room with higher pressure – called positive pressure – inside than out keeps contaminants from entering the room. However, a clean room with lower pressure inside than out – called negative pressure – traps contaminants in the room.
As long as the air distribution products you use for your commercial HVAC system support your critical environments and neither impede nor co-mingle the airflow, your cleanrooms stay clean.
Considerations for Cleanroom Design
In both positive and negative pressure cleanrooms, the pressure is achieved by controlling the air put in and taken out of the room.
In a positive pressure cleanroom, filtered air is pumped into the room via HEPA filtration and other commercial HVAC components dedicated solely to the cleanroom’s system. Positive pressure ensures everything in the cleanroom stays safe in case of a breach (such as an open door or window). This pressurization prevents unfiltered air from outside from seeping in.
For applications requiring negative air pressure, external exhausts pull air from the cleanroom faster than air enters over time. This negative pressure keeps air flowing into the cleanroom to fill the low-pressure area, so contaminants naturally cannot leave.
To maintain air pressure, your design must have adjacent spaces maintained at a respectively lower or higher pressure than the neighboring cleanroom. A pressurization system is just one critical environment solution you could consider to ensure balance – and must be considered in order to meet the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air Conditioning Engineers Standard 170 Ventilation of Health Care Facilities (ASHRAE 170). These systems also can be adjusted, and sound an alarm when pressurization changes. Non-electric monitoring systems are also acceptable, although they tend to be less reliable than the electronic monitor, control panel, and sensor.
Positive Pressure Cleanrooms
Positive pressure cleanrooms are required where contaminants must be kept from entering. Semiconductor cleanrooms, microprocessesor cleanrooms, aerospace cleanrooms, a
nd medical cleanrooms require positive pressure to protect what’s inside from particle interference.Negative Pressure Cleanrooms
Low pressure cleanrooms are required when substances or contagions must be isolated to protect people and spaces outside of it. Medical cleanrooms where research is conducted and airborne infectious isolation rooms require low pressures, as do certain pharmaceutical processes.
Critical Environment Solutions from AJ Manufacturing
Get the high level of precision and care your cleanrooms need with air distribution systems and air filtration systems from AJ Manufacturing. Our components and diffusers meet your project’s exact specifications to support your processes and needs in your critical environments.
Our stainless steel HVAC equipment includes our signature ceiling-mounted Criti-Clean Ultra Fan Filter Unit (FFU), and our original Criti-Clean Fan-Powered Laminar Flow Diffuser with HEPA filtration. Our operating room systems and mobile units are also heavy hitters when it comes to keeping your cleanrooms in service.
Our critical environment solutions are trusted by Boeing, Johns Hopkins Space Telescope Science Institute, the National Cancer Institute, and more.
Our fabrication process accounts for your project timelines and ensures the highest possible quality products. It all begins when you request and approve an estimate. Then, our experts go to work to assemble your order using our state-of-the-art technology and easy-to-clean stainless steel materials. All products are carefully packaged and prepared for shipping, throughout the U.S., and internationally.
Request More Information About Our Air Distribution Products
Located in Kansas City, Missouri, for nearly 100 years, AJ Manufacturing fabricates commercial HVAC components to meet your site’s unique challenges, including laminar flow diffusers, supply and return grilles, and low-profile ceiling systems with built-in LEDs to save space and eliminate clutter.
If you need an estimate for your commercial air distribution system needs, contact our National Sales Manager, Amy Van Wagner, by email, or send us a message online.