White Rooms or cleanroom, in English are rooms arranged to reduce contamination as much as possible while maintaining an aseptic environment. Although they cannot achieve absolute sterility, if used correctly, they keep contamination at a controlled and known level, specified in the number of particles per cubic meter of air. This number is several thousand times lower than what would be found outdoors, thus creating a safe space to work on projects that require particular environmental conditions.
When discussing what a clean room is, it is often ignored that each clean room has to be designed for a particular purpose and, therefore, is different. Their purposes and structure will differ depending on the industry or sector in which they will be used. However, in addition to the design of the structure and arrangement of the elements, since the most likely source of contamination is the room operator himself, an essential part of the room is the development of appropriate cleanliness protocols to ensure they are aseptic. There are many reasons why clean rooms are important.
What characteristics do Clean Rooms have?
Clean rooms must meet particular conditions, so their characteristics are particular. There are many ways to control the operating conditions inside these spaces:
- The air is sterile and is renewed several times per hour to eliminate the presence of possible contaminants.
- The internal pressure in these rooms is slightly higher than the external pressure to prevent airflow inward when the doors are opened.
- The walls are covered in vinyl, and the floors are usually made of PVC or epoxy resin that offers completely continuous surfaces without grooves.
- The surfaces are expressly designed with curved shapes to prevent dust accumulation and make maintaining a certain level of asepsis easier.
- High-efficiency HEPA filters are used, retaining 99.97% of 0.3-micron particles in the environment.
- The materials, personnel, and waste flows are closely monitored to minimize any risk of cross or external contamination.
In short, clean rooms are essential in environments that require extraordinary asepsis and hygiene. Among the different industries, we would talk about clean rooms in the food industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and clean rooms for cosmetics, where they play transcendent roles, guaranteeing the tightness of the work and production atmospheres. If you have questions, you can contact us for free, and we will help you.
There are no differences between a white room and a clean room. Although some consider that the former goes a step further in eliminating contaminants and their facilities are more sophisticated, there needs to be an established standard for clean rooms and a different one for clean rooms. Still, instead, it is simply a naming issue.
Both names are used interchangeably, so we can say that there is no difference between white rooms and clean rooms; the only thing you have to worry about is that they comply with the regulations.
Application of Clean Rooms
To define what clean rooms are and what they are used for, it must be taken into account that their primary function is to reduce the probability of contamination within a sterile, aseptic, or hygiene chain. In this way, workers and products are protected from the dangers of handling the latter. Briefly, the following applications can be found:
Avoid cross-contamination. The clean room reduces the passage of contamination-carrying aerosols from other laboratory sections. A clean room can serve as containment between two areas with different sterility requirements or that carry out techniques that could affect each other.
Protection of intermediate products so that the producers themselves do not degrade them. The room can prevent the growth of strains that could affect the final product.
Protection against external contamination. A clean room must be located so that an external airflow cannot reach it. Thus, sensitive products can be protected from microorganisms that would degrade them.
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For products requiring high sterility, a clean room is essential to guarantee this.
Protection against abrasive aerosols. The clean room can function as containment against the passage of dust particles that can interfere with exemplary projects, even causing irreparable damage to the final product. Maintaining safe rooms is essential in many processes in sectors such as the chemical or hospital sectors.