University challenge

Designing and building any cleanroom is a specialist task, but creating cleanroom solutions and laboratory facilities for the university research sector in the fast-developing world of nanotechnology presents its own unique challenges.

At an early planning stage careful consideration needs to be given to some key areas to ensure a fully integrated design that meets the requirements of all the intended users. These areas include: • addressing all end users' needs; • vibration measures; • airflow patterns; • flexibility of space;

This type of facility often involves a number of specialists who are experts in their own fields. It is therefore essential that all these individual requirements are meticulously collated to ensure their incorporation into the design. This process of active involvement needs to continue throughout the project, enabling all parties to contribute to the design so that the final solution meets everyone's requirements, irrespective of their field of expertise. The key to a successful contract is often confirming the specification required by the user's process equipment and designing measures to reduce and control vibration. Much of the university's engineering research and development work is carried out at atomic level, which relies on low vibration levels down to 3µm/s. To put this in perspective, humans can generally detect changes in vibration from 100µm/s upwards. Low velocity air distribution should be considered, as airflow patterns will affect the end users' experiments; however, this should not compromise the contrasting requirements of maintaining good airflow in order to achieve the room design conditions while having minimal airflow turbulence across the workstations. Air turbulence will undoubtedly create a problem when looking through a microscope at a molecule which is 1/80000th of the diameter of a human hair!

Flexibility of space It is imperative that the design and layout of the facility is capable of catering for future changes as far as is practicable. The very nature of research and development work means that process equipment is often added to or relocated at some stage. By taking this into account at the planning stage, clients will reduce the likelihood of major reworking of the process and building services further down the line. Consideration of a modular design approach would facilitate this.

The challenge These are just a few of the key factors to consider when designing a new cleanroom or laboratory facility, and which are often forgotten during the traditional tender process. One reason for this is a failure to involve a cleanroom design and build specialist at the design conception stage, or even during the preparation of the tender specifications and drawings. This avoidable omission usually results in the later reworking of the design with knock-on effects for the project costs. Clean Room Construction strives to design and build first class cleanrooms and laboratory facilities which not only meet time and budget constraints, but also fully satisfy the expectations of all end users. To achieve all three requires the sort of partnership approach which has already led to the company successfully completing projects at universities in Cambridge, Exeter, Liverpool, Glasgow, Surrey, Bath and Southampton. The challenge for universities considering new design and build projects is to adopt a similar partnership approach from the outset. The cleanroom specialist will bring a wealth of experience and expertise to the design conception stage of a project, while the client will bring all the requirements of the end users. Together they will be able to find and create the best long-term technical solutions for everyone concerned with the project.