Air monitoring in clean room - (Feb/09/2010 )

Hi,

I’m working on a project of clean room building for R&D use and I need advices about environmental monitoring. We plan to build a 100m2 clean room, grade B or C according to BPF (equivalent GMP) depending on the conditions of use. We are interested in getting rapid results of airborne contamination but we don’t know how we should perform the controls. Can anyone give feedbacks/information?

Thank you in advance,

Claire

Claire,

What are you interested in comparing your clean room to? That should determine your controls. It seems to me that you should either be using either another grade B or C clean room as the control, or the same room prior to the various clean room protections being turned on / installed.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
-Carlton

Thank you for your help Carlton,

I can’t really speak about this activity because it is confidential. I just can say that we need a grade B clean room (according to GMP) for some of our experiments. I know that to achieve this grade we need to perform some air sampling analysis. We would like to have those result is a short time and we don’t know which material fits with this use. Can you maybe give advices?

Claire,

In all honesty this stretches my area of expertise a bit, but I know that there are devices for air sampling geared towards bacterial sampling.

For example, the Spin-Air by IUL: (just for the record, we have no involvement with this company)
http://www.iul-inst.com/spin-air-air-sampler.html

If that's not quite what you're looking for, perhaps they will be familiar with similar devices for more broad-based air quality analysis.

Best regards,
-Carlton

you want chemical or biological control of the air?

There are several methods for airsampling of fungi or bacteria which differ fundamentally. As I do not want to write down all the procedures, some more details would be fine.

And for the control: always take the air outside as control. Everything round there is supposed to be in rooms etc too. if there are big differences, you will have to have a look on potential reasons.

We are mainly interested in biological control of the air (microbiological analysis, identification of pollens, molds spores....). Thank you for your help and advices.

for a quick start have a look here. airsampling.

a mechanical "airsampler" that actively collects the air on an agar plate is very useful for fungi and yeasts.

for bacteria you get much higher recover rates with an "impinger". The basic technique is described here, there are some recent papers, you just have to google them.

Hi Claire!

We also had such issues in my lab. We needed to perform rapid analyses of biological contamination. We also wanted to asses the non cultivable flora. After testing several equipments we chose the Coriolis air sampler because it was easy to use and gave good result. With this method, airborne particles are concentrated into a liquid media, which allows getting results in few hours by skipping to the incubation period.

Hope that helps.

Andy