[geeks] E3K airflow

[Brian Dunbar]

On Jan 27, 2004, at 1:28 AM, Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez wrote:

> On Mon, 26 Jan 2004, Brian Dunbar wrote:
>>
>> If memory serves, air circulation in clean rooms works the same way -
>> air is blasted _down_ into the floor plates where the scrubbers live.
>> Man, you've never _seen_ dust-free computers until you remove one from
>> inside a clean room.
>
> Actually the clean rooms I have seen do not use air for cooling at 
> all, a
> lot of them rely on other cooling mechanisms like heat exchangers to 
> keep
> the room temperature as stable as possible (since many processes are
> pretty temperature sensitive).

I've only been in four myself - but they were all on the same site, 
same company.  And one doesn't count as it was only a 'gown, booties 
and mask room, not the full blown one with airlocks.  It was explained 
to me that (and this has been a few years and the memory suffers) that 
a positive airflow was maintained to keep the nasty bits going in their 
natural direction (down).  I recall that there were curtains of air 
blasting down at points where you had to walk through into different 
sections, and a less powerful but noisy -whoosh- adjacent to the 
workstations where their fans would emit dust.  And I _know_ that the 
service areas behind the works, but in the clean room (reminded me of 
Jeffries tubes from Star Trek) had a gale-like force blasting along and 
down - they weren't much fun to be in.

Perhaps we're talking about diffrn't terms?  I said circulation when 
what I'm probably talking about was the system that removed the gunk 
from the environment.  You're talking about cooling.

~brian