Technical note: The influence of furniture and equipment layouts on airflow pattern in a clean room

Abstract

The layout of the production line in any clean rooms will change according to the production process and this posed a problem for post clean room maintenance. Air velocity is one of the many problematic issues commonly found in clean room environment. It is important to address this on-going problem whenever there is an upgrading of the production process in which more advanced equipment were being introduced to the clean room to automate the process. This paper examines the characteristics of airflow distribution within the clean room due to changes in the production process. This study was conducted for a class 100 clean room at a disk-drive manufacturing firm. The airflow distribution in the clean room was simulated using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. This model provides a valuable insight into the processes that are difficult and time-consuming to study experimentally. The results showed that furniture such as a workbench and a laminar flow hood have great impact on the airflow pattern in the clean room. The predicted airflow results offered substantial benefits in the design and development of a better furniture layout plan that eradicates any of the possible turbulence problems.