Analyzing energy usage, labor, and materials can help your company find new ways to cut costs.

Whether you’re building a new facility or maintaining your current clean space, there are a lot of ways to save.

It often comes down to that tricky balance between capital expenditure and long-term operational costs. By analyzing the various ways you’re spending money — such as energy usage, labor and materials — can help your company get creative with cutting costs.

Here are some innovative strategies and the latest technology in clean room design.

Air Flow:

“The industry has started to challenge the current approach to managing air flow and say, ‘We’re spending tons of money on this,’” says Michael Vileikis, director of process technology at Integrated Project Services.

Vileikis says that typically manufacturers have based their approach to air flow on certain rules of thumb, such as “a Grade C room needs 20 air changes an hour. {Or a Grade A room needs 100 feet per minute air velocity.}” But many manufacturers have begun to question those norms and reevaluate the number of air changes or air flows needed to stay in compliance.

Yet, there is still a tendency to rely on traditional air flow systems that use air from outside of the facility and then filter it. Instead, Vileikis says that recirculated air is a better route.

Even though there are concerns that using a system that circulates air between different rooms could lead to cross contamination, Vileikis says the risks can be managed well when the system is properly filtered and maintained. And switching to recirculated air can provide major energy savings.

“If I recirculate the air, my energy costs come way down,” he says. “As long as I can maintain and test appropriately, I can save tons of energy and operation costs.”

Minimize the Size of Your Clean Room:

Quite simply, the less space you have to maintain with clean room guidelines, the better.

“You want to minimize the amount of classified space as much as you can,” Brian Egan, director of process architecture at Integrated Project Services says.

Egan says that one strategy to keeping the clean space smaller is having through the wall connections for the process equipment.  This strategy maintains the majority of the process equipment is in technical, or less classified spaces.

Another way to minimize the amount of space you’re using is to set up an isolator to handle materials. Isolators help minimize the amount of contact the materials have with people and with the surrounding environment. Conditions within the isolator can also be controlled more easily than a large room.

Opt for PVC Over Caulk:

 According to Egan, this approach is a perfect example of when spending more for a higher-quality product during construction can save money down the line.

When welding wall panels together, Egan says that caulk can deteriorate and generate particles in the air.

Instead, Egan says solvent welding PVC lasts longer and requires little to no maintenace.

Choose a Walkable Ceiling:

 In a traditional space, manufacturers use suspended ceilings. Then to access the lights or pumps in the ceiling, manufacturers have to install cat walks to get to the needed platforms.

A prefabricated walkable ceiling, however, will allow the same access without having to install any new components.

If you only look at the upfront costs of a traditional drywall system with a suspended ceiling and catwalks versus a clean room panel system with walkable ceiling, Egan says that it’s “a wash.” However, the ease of use with a walkable system will mean that you can cut down on long-term operational costs. Of course, time is money, so the easier it is to get around the room, the more you save.

Go Prefab:

There are a number of benefits to opting for a prefabricated clean room structure

Clean room systems let you construct a room within a building.  Firstly, if a company buys a prefabricated room and it is assembled away from their facility,  that means the manufacturer can basically accomplish two goals at once — building out two parts of the facility at the same time.

Egan says he was involved in a project once where the company took this approach and it saved the client nine months on the construction schedule.

“So you’re a client building a facility, but meanwhile [another company is] building an entire system in a modular structure that is tractor-trailer sized … Then they wrap it up and ship it to the site and connect it all like Legos, and then you do all the welding and finish it. Then you have a facility within a facility,” Vileikis explains.

Another bonus is that prefabricated units can be moved so that companies can more easily respond to changes in the market.

“Maybe you realize that the market for that product isn’t where you are — now it’s in Beijing,” Vileikis says. “Now you disassemble it and ship it over there. It’s pretty interesting.”

(Editor’s Note: The above is a revised version, with corrections, of a story that ran in the INTERPHEX Show Daily on March 21, 2017.)