The birth of the clean room
The emergence and development of all technologies are due to the needs of production. Clean room technology is no exception. During World War II, air-bearing gyroscopes produced in the United States for aircraft navigation had to be reworked an average of 120 times for every 10 gyroscopes due to unstable quality. During the Korean Peninsula War in the early 1950s, more than a million electronic components were replaced in the 160,000 electronic communication equipment in the United States. Radar failure occurred 84% of the time, and submarine sonar failure occurred 48% of the time. The reason is that electronic devices and parts have poor reliability and unstable quality. The military and manufacturers investigated the cause and ultimately determined from many aspects that it was related to an unclean production environment. Although no expense was spared and various stringent measures were taken to close the production workshop, the results were minimal. So this was the birth of the clean room!
Clean room development
The first stage: Until the early 1950s, the HEPA-High Efficiency Particulate Air Filter, which was successfully developed by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1951 to solve the problem of capturing radioactive dust that is harmful to humans, was applied to the delivery system of production workshops. Air filtration truly gave birth to a clean room with modern significance.
The second stage: In 1961, Willis Whitfield, a senior researcher at Sandia National Laboratories in the United States, proposed what was called laminar flow at the time, and is now called unidirectional flow. (unidirectional flow) clean air flow organization plan and applied to actual projects. Since then, the clean room has reached an unprecedented level of cleanliness.
The third stage: In the same year, the U.S. Air Force formulated and issued the world's first clean room standard TO-00-25--203 Air Force Directive "Standard for the Design and Operational Characteristics of Clean Rooms and Clean Benches." On this basis, the US federal standard FED-STD-209, which divided clean rooms into three levels, was announced in December 1963. So far, the prototype of perfect clean room technology has been formed.
The above three key advancements are often hailed as three milestones in the history of modern clean room development.
In the mid-1960s, clean rooms were popping up in various industrial sectors in the United States. It was not only used in the military industry, but also promoted in electronics, optics, micro bearings, micro motors, photosensitive films, ultrapure chemical reagents and other industrial sectors, playing a great role in promoting the development of science, technology and industry at that time. To this end, the following is a detailed introduction to domestic and foreign countries.
Development comparison
Abroad: In the early 1950s, in order to solve the problem of capturing radioactive dust that is harmful to the human body, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission introduced the high-efficiency particle air filter (HEPA) in 1950, which became the first milestone in the history of the development of clean technology. In the 1960s, clean rooms sprung up in electronic precision machinery and other factories in the United States. At the same time, the process of transplanting industrial clean room technology to biological clean rooms began. In 1961, the laminar flow (unidirectional flow) clean room was born. The world's earliest clean room standard - U.S. Air Force Technical Doctrine 203 was formed. In the early 1970s, the focus of clean room construction began to shift to the medical, pharmaceutical, food and biochemical industries. In addition to the United States, other industrially advanced countries such as Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, the former Soviet Union, the Netherlands, etc. also attach great importance to and vigorously develop clean technology. After the 1980s, the United States and Japan successfully developed new ultra-hepa filters with a filtration target of 0.1 μm and a collection efficiency of 99.99%. Finally, ultra-hepa clean rooms with 0.1μm level 10 and 0.1μm level 1 were built, which brought the development of clean technology into a new era.
China: From the early 1960s to the late 1970s, these ten years were the starting and foundation stage of China's clean room technology. Roughly ten years later than abroad. It was a very special and difficult era, with a weak economy and no strong-country diplomacy. Under such difficult conditions and around the needs of precision machinery, aviation instrumentation and electronic industries, China's clean room technology workers began their own entrepreneurial journey. From the late 1970s to the late 1980s, China's clean room technology experienced a sunny development stage. In the development process of China's clean room technology, many landmark and important achievements were almost all born at this stage. The indicators have reached the technical level of foreign countries in the 1980s. From the early 1990s to the present, China's economy has maintained stable and rapid growth, international investment has continued to be injected, and a number of multinational groups have successively built numerous microelectronics factories in China. Therefore, domestic technology and researchers have more opportunities to directly contact the design concepts of foreign high-level clean rooms, and understand the world's advanced equipment and devices, management and maintenance, etc.
With the development of science and technology, China's clean room companies are also developing rapidly. People's living standards continue to improve, and their requirements for living environment and quality of life are getting higher and higher. Clean room engineering technology has gradually been adapted to household air purification. At present, China's clean room projects are not only suitable for electronics, electrical appliances, medicine, food, scientific research and other industries, but are also likely to be used in homes, public entertainment places, educational institutions, etc. With the continuous development of science and technology, clean room engineering companies have gradually spread to thousands of households. The scale of the domestic clean room equipment industry has also grown day by day, and people have begun to slowly enjoy the effects of clean room engineering.
Post time: Sep-20-2023