Page 24 - ISCC'22

25 th INTERNATIONAL S YMPOSIUM
October 11-13, ON CONTAMINATION CONTROL AND
Antalya TURKIYE | 2022 CLEANROOM TECHNOLOGY
24

The solution proposed by the works aforementioned are good examples and efforts of ap-
plied ventilation concept for Covid-19 prevention purpose, and not for contamination control
of products as normally it should be in clean and controlled environments.

Generally, for clean environment, it is meant an indoor and confined space where contamina-
tion, thermos-hygrometric conditions, air velocity and pressure are controlled within specific
values. ISO 14644 (ISO 14644-1, 2015) rules the world or contamination control in cleanroom
together with the GMPs GL issued by EMA (EU-GMP- Annex 1, 2008) and FDA (US Food
and Drug Administration, 2004) when dealing with sterile drugs and veterinary products.
Moreover, sectors where a strict control of contamination is required are broader and span
from food&beverage, aerospace, HC applications to semiconductor, etc. The stricter are the
requisites of contamination, the more difficult is to handle and to move personnel or semifin-
ished products even within the same level of a clean environment without having problems
of contamination. The contamination level acceptable in a cleanroom environment is many
orders of magnitude less than the one accepted by a civil elevator, in terms of particle size
and concentration. Therefore, it comes easy to understand that the way of concepting and
designing an elevator for cleanroom is unique because unique is the process and the URS
required by the production environment where it is located.
Nowadays requests and challenges in cleantech sector require a more flexible and agile
production with interconnection of different clean environments for production and han-
dling. Moreover, there is lack of indoor space and of green fields for expansion of facility
VERTICAL
sites usually located in conurbated areas. Therefore, the usage of vertical productions with
TRANSPORTA-
interconnection through clean lifts will be mandatory in the near future for better space
TION THROUGH
exploitation. In addition to technical problems, a new consciousness in energy saving and
CONTROLLED green environment has raised in the last years due to energy cost and climatic changes. The
ENVIRONMENTS: new mantra seems to be: “less is better”, where less stands for less energy consumption
A CLEAN LIFT and less usage of – plastic – time – manpower for packaging and handling of semi-finished
products in dirty or CNC areas back&forth from clean fab areas.
PROTOTYPE FOR
MULTIPURPOSE Based on these assumptions, the work here presented deals with the design, building and
USE validation process of a clean lift system dedicated for vertical transportation of personnel and
clean products between two cleanroom production facilities located at different floors. The
peculiarities of this study is the presence of difference HVAC and control systems for each
cleanroom factories level involved in the studies which makes the project challenging. The
solution proposed in this work is based on a class ISO 7 clean lift served by an independent
and adaptive HVAC systems with a dedicated control and environmental monitoring system
able to guarantee the desired working and contamination conditions in both cleanroom
floors and vertical passages for the quality of products and personnel safety disregarding
the outside boundary conditions of the systems and factories.
To our knowledge, this is one of the first case studies where a multipurpose clean lift is
used in a real clean production process. The main aim of this work is that of introducing a
lean manufacturing concept also for a vertical transportation system which must be able
to guarantee cleanliness level, safety and productivity by means of the pragmatic design
approach and technical solutions adopted in this work.

2 CASE STUDY & METHODOLOGY
2.1 Case study
The solution of the multipurpose clean lift has been conceived for a real application in a
biotech company which has two cleanroom production lines, not connected among them,
placed at different floors within the same building with classified environments of ISO Class
8 according to ISO14644-1 (ISO 14644-1, 2015). Semi-finished products and personnel need
to move between the different cleanrooms at different floors. Vertical connection between
the two cleanroom production fabs are stairs for personnel and a civil lifts for products. Both
vertical connections are not classified and dirty, therefore especially for semi-finished prod-