Designing an energy-efficient cleanroom is all about identifying the areas that have the most potential for waste and cutting energy consumption until the result is a streamlined, high-efficiency, ultra-clean cleanroom. 

Your first priority in designing your cleanroom is function. You want to make sure your cleanroom is accomplishing its main task of meeting class standards and protecting your work with as few contaminants as possible. Your second priority should be to cut costs and extra energy usage wherever possible, not only to allow your cleanroom to function at its highest level but also to save valuable energy, not only reducing your operational costs but lessening your cleanroom’s environmental impact.

The biggest waste in cleanroom design comes from building your cleanroom to run overcapacity, even though it’s not strictly necessary to meet minimum requirements. This makes your cleanroom’s systems work harder than they need and cost more money to run. Let’s look at a few areas where you can cut back on your energy consumption when designing an energy-efficient cleanroom.

Energy Efficient Cleanroom Space

When designing an energy-efficient cleanroom, one of the major factors to consider is space. To run your cleanroom at maximum efficiency, your cleanroom should only be as large as necessary to accommodate equipment and personnel. You should condense your cleanroom wherever possible by removing modular cleanroom wall panels or reshaping its SoftWalls. This effectively reduces the amount of air in your cleanroom, helping you achieve better control over its quality. It also means you will use less energy to filter, change, heat, and cool the smallest amount of air possible.

Assembling the cleanroom on-site has the potential to create more gaps during the building process where air and energy could escape. Alternatively, modular, pre-engineered cleanrooms will save energy, time, and money, while minimizing expensive air leakage.  Cleanroom design experts can help you plan out your cleanroom ahead of time and anticipate the areas air might escape, designing optimal airflow patterns using computational fluid dynamics software. 

Your energy-efficient cleanroom design should control leakage as much as possible, including around the most conspicuous areas such as pass-throughs, walls, ceilings, and duct connections. Your condensed cleanroom will also need to avoid overpressurization. Overpressurization is not only expensive to generate but increases air leakage, which is extra energy seeping away.

Energy Efficient Cleanroom Systems 

Your cleanroom’s energy usage is dominated by its HVAC system. The HVAC system is responsible for heating and cooling your cleanroom, regulating humidity, and controlling air changes and filtration. It’s also one of the biggest areas you can cut down on energy usage and costs. 

Many cleanrooms use their HVAC systems to excess, changing the air more frequently than absolutely necessary. By reducing air change rates to where your cleanroom can still meet its class standards, you can make your cleanroom more energy efficient. Particularly if your cleanroom already uses a particle counting system, the air might not need to be changed as frequently to achieve optimal cleanliness. Also, keeping your HEPA and ULPA filters in excellent condition will increase the efficiency of each air change, so fewer will be needed to keep the air clean.

Consider installing updated HVAC systems that use new, energy-efficient technology. These systems might recover “wasted heat” by reheating used air or water from your cleanroom’s air compressor or the chiller condenser. New technology can also consider what times your cleanroom needs to be at high-standard operational cleanliness versus when the space is unoccupied and can possibly conserve energy. If your cleanroom is not in use 24 hours a day, you can adjust the temperature, humidity, and air change rates to save energy when the room is dormant. 

Energy Efficient Cleanroom Fixtures

Finally, energy-saving fixtures can be an integral part of your energy-efficient cleanroom design. Use LED lighting and water-saving appliances wherever possible. Consider attaching detection sensors to overhead lighting to limit wasted energy.

When selecting industry-specific equipment for your cleanroom, choose models that can run at the lowest level possible. If you can, use equipment that can be turned off or have some components switched off when unused. Similar to your HVAC system, using newer equipment may present more energy savings than outdated equipment. 

To see if new equipment or systems are a valuable investment, don’t consider the price of the update so much as the amount they can save over time. The savings you can accumulate through the design of an energy-efficient cleanroom can offset the costs of the upgrades and help you achieve your cleanroom goals with minimal waste.

With careful planning and design, you can create an energy-efficient cleanroom that achieves its goals, complies with class standards, and saves energy costs as much as possible. An energy-efficient cleanroom will allow you to address your environmental impact while managing operational costs and enjoying the savings from decreased energy usage and expenditures. 

Looking to make your cleanroom as efficient as possible? Talk to the experts at Angstrom. We take pride in creating customized cleanroom solutions that fit your needs, no matter how big or small. If an energy efficient cleanroom is what you’re looking for, we’re here to make it happen.

Designing a cleanroom is already a challenge. Add onto that the challenge of limited funds, and your cleanroom design project may seem almost impossible. But even with budget constraints or limitations, you can still design an efficient and effective cleanroom for your application. Here’s everything you need to know about designing a cleanroom on a budget:

How to Determine Your Cleanroom Design Budget

Before you can even begin designing, you need to determine your cleanroom design budget. This blog post breaks down how to do that and what factors you need to consider when making that budget, including cleanroom classification, construction type, and more.

Hidden Cost Benefits to Modular Construction

Anyone who’s pinching pennies on their cleanroom design should look into the possibility of a modular cleanroom. This post outlines the cost benefits to modular construction, from lower sticker price to tax benefits from quicker depreciation, that you may not have considered when writing your initial cleanroom design budget.

Everything You Need to Know About Cleanroom Design

This post has all the information you’ll need to begin your cleanroom design project, from understanding ISO classifications to that all-important consideration: budget.

Cutting Cleanroom Costs

A tight budget doesn’t just affect your cleanroom design project, it can affect the day-to-day operations of your cleanroom as well. And with expensive, state-of-the-art equipment, constant purification and filtration of the air, temperature and humidity controls, and necessary personal protective equipment and cleanroom apparel, operating a cleanroom isn’t cheap. This post outlines a few of the ways you can reduce cleanroom costs during the operation and design phases.

How Does Cleanroom Classification Affect Your Cleanroom Budget?

Your required cleanroom classification has a huge effect on the budget for your cleanroom, both in terms of design and operation of the cleanroom. For many reasons, the more stringent your classification, the more you’ll need to allocate to your cleanroom budget. This post outlines why that is and what it means for your cleanroom and budget.

Designing a cleanroom on a tight budget? A modular cleanroom may be the right solution! Contact Angstrom Technology to discuss how our cleanroom offerings can work for you.

Open concept offices are the new thing in corporate design, and the idea of the open workspace is expanding into cleanrooms and laboratories as well. There are many benefits to open concept workspaces, like increased transparency and cooperation, but also some downsides, like the noise level. Besides these factors, there are additional considerations for open cleanroom design, due to the nature of the processes and requirements of cleanrooms. If you’re interested in open cleanroom design, here’s what you should consider.

Benefits of Open Cleanroom Design

Transparency and Collaboration

In an open laboratory workspace, everyone can see what everyone else is doing. This can mean that chemists and product engineers are working together in the same space. These different groups can interact with each other in an open setting, offering each other ideas and solutions based on their unique insight and expertise. You’ll also get transparency across teams, so that everyone is aware of what’s going on and what other teams are working on or exploring.

Flexibility

An open floor plan allows for the layout of your cleanroom to change as your organization’s needs and applications change. New equipment can be added to accommodate a new process, additional workspaces can be added for new staff, and furniture and equipment can be rearranged to best serve the needs of the cleanroom at the time.

Cost Savings

Open concept cleanrooms can save money in three major ways: they can save space in your facilities, freeing it up for other needs; they allow teams to share equipment, resources, and support staff because they are co-located; and have lower construction costs than creating smaller, application-specific cleanroom spaces.

Disadvantages of Open Cleanroom Design

Ventilation and Filtration Challenges

With the larger space that open cleanrooms present, getting ventilation and filtration right so that the space is adequately ventilated and meets particulate contamination standards can be difficult. 

Loud Equipment

Noisy equipment can create a lot of noise pollution in an open cleanroom, and that noise may be disruptive to sensitive processes as well as disruptive to personnel.

Sensitive Work and Processes

Some processes and tasks are extremely sensitive or are at great risk for factors like cross-contamination. These processes need dedicated space, and likely have more stringent cleanroom standards and procedures that other cleanroom applications.

Solutions for Open Cleanroom Design

One way to solve some of the challenges of an open cleanroom is modular design. The flexibility of modular cleanrooms allow for changes to the layout of the space as needed. For applications that need dedicated space because of the delicate nature of the processes, a modular design allows you to create that necessary space within the open cleanroom. Soundproof modular rooms for noisy equipment can solve the noise issue in the otherwise open space.

Angstrom Technology can design a cleanroom to meet all your requirements and design considerations. Speak with one of our design engineers to get started.