Understanding ISO5 Cleanroom Standards & Applications

 What is ISO5 Cleanroom?

ISO5 cleanroom is also known as class 100 cleanroom. This clean class means that the number of particles per cubic feet greater than or equal to 0.5 microns in clean room must be less than 100(less than 3520 per cubic meter), as shown in the table below.

According to Fed 209E, it is rated as class 100, a high standard clean class cleanroom.

ISO 5 cleanrooms have strict control requirements for airborne particles, including dust particles and bacteria. The number of these tiny particles is strictly limited to ensure that high air quality in the cleanroom. Personnel is required to wear one-piece clean suits when entering such cleanrooms to prevent the introduction of any contaminants. At the same time, ionization equipment is used in the cleanroom to eliminate static electricity and further ensure the cleanliness of the environment.

ISO 5 cleanrooms are used in a wide range of industries requiring highly clean environments, including pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, chip manufacturing, and aerospace research.

What Industries Are ISO5 Cleanrooms Normally Applied?

Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Industries: These industries require protection from microorganisms and other contaminants during manufacturing and R&D to ensure the safety and efficacy of pharmaceuticals and biological products. ISO 5 cleanrooms provide such an environment to ensure product purity.

Semiconductor and Chip Manufacturing Industries: Semiconductor and chip manufacturing requires high levels of cleanliness, as tiny dust particles can cause damage to microcircuits. ISO 5 cleanrooms provide strict control over the amount of airborne particles, ensuring a smooth production process and high product yields

Aerospace and Aviation Industries: In the manufacture of critical components, such as engines and precision instruments, the performance and reliability of the product needs to be ensured. ISO 5 cleanrooms can provide such an environment that minimizes failures and performance degradation due to contamination.

Optical and Precision Machinery Industries: These industries need to manufacture high-precision products, such as lenses, sensors, etc. ISO 5 cleanrooms can avoid the impact of dust and particles on the precision of the products and ensure product quality.

In addition, ISO 5 cleanrooms are also suitable for laboratories and scientific research organizations that require a highly clean environment, such as biomedical research, materials science research etc. The research work in these fields has strict requirements on air cleanliness to ensure the accuracy and reliability of experimental results.

The working principle of ISO-5 cleanroom

It is usually a unidirectional flow cleanroom: in the unidirectional flow cleanroom, from the air supply port to the air return port, the  cross-section of air flow pattern remains unchanged. With the equalization effect of plenum chamber and high-efficiency filters , and the flow rate keeps uniform and even all the way. The main features of laminar cleanroom include unidirectional and parallel airflow in the work area and no eddy current. The flow pattern parallels to each other, in a single direction, repelling the air out of cleanroom and at the same time fill the cleanroom with clean and fresh, so as to purify the air. As a result, this airflow pattern is also called “piston flow”, “flat push flow”, or “mild air jet”. In this sense, clean air is like an air piston while the room is like a “cylinder”. Clean air is pushed into the cleanroom under “piston” pressure and the dusty air is squeezed out of the room.

Airborne contamination from personnel and production can be immediately removed by this piston airflow. Turbulent flow ventilation systems use the principle of mixing and dilution. In an empty room without any obstructions, unidirectional flow removes the contaminants very quickly with a much lower air velocity than previously mentioned. However, in an operating room, machines and people walking around the machines can create obstacles to the airflow. Obstructions can turn unidirectional flow into turbulence, which creates air masses around the obstruction. The movement of people can also cause unidirectional flow to become turbulent. In these turbulent flows, the air is only slightly diluted due to lower air velocity, thus allowing for higher pollution concentrations. Therefore, it is important to maintain air velocity in the range of 0.3 m/s to 0.5 m/s (60 ft/min to 100 ft/min), so that interrupted unidirectional flow can be restored quickly enough to adequately dilute contamination in the turbulent zone around the obstruction.