In med­i­cal fields, the elec­tron­ic and semi­con­duc­tor in­dus­try, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal in­dus­try, gene tech­nol­o­gy and other fields, a lot of pro­duc­tion pro­cess­es must be car­ried out under very de­mand­ing clean room con­di­tions. Due to the in­creas­ing amount of sen­si­tive prod­ucts and pro­ce­dures, the lim­its for the par­ti­cle con­tent and ac­cept­able par­ti­cle sizes de­creased dur­ing the last years. This trend will con­tin­ue in the fu­ture. Against this back­ground there are in­creas­ing in­quiries re­gard­ing clean room clean­ing. Con­cern­ing pro­fes­sion­al clean room clean­ing, no sys­tem­at­ic sci­en­tif­ic in­ves­ti­ga­tions have been avail­able yet. This is the rea­son why cur­rent stan­dards (for ex­am­ple VDI 2083-4 and ISO 14644-5) do com­prise only lit­tle de­mands con­cern­ing this sub­ject.

The VDI 2083-4 de­fines “par­tic­u­late sur­face clean­li­ness”, but points out, that there is no cor­re­la­tion be­tween the air clean­li­ness and the par­tic­u­late sur­face clean­li­ness. For the use of clean­ing wipes, the guide­line gives some rec­om­men­da­tions based on em­pir­i­cal rank­ings, how­ev­er, there are no pub­lished sci­en­tif­ic in­ves­ti­ga­tions con­cern­ing the suit­abil­i­ty of clean room wipes. With­in the re­search pro­ject a safe, val­i­dat­ed and eco­nom­i­cal clean­ing pro­cess based on op­ti­mised wip­ing pro­cess­es in com­bi­na­tion with the ap­pli­ca­tion of car­bon diox­ide snow for sur­faces in clean rooms was pro­vid­ed. The re­sults were be sum­ma­rized in a func­tion­al ma­trix. This al­lows an op­ti­mum ad­just­ment of a clean room clean­ing method to a spe­cif­ic clean­ing prob­lem.

We thank the Ar­beits­ge­mein­schaft in­dus­trieller Forschungvere­ini­gun­gen e.V. (AiF) (As­so­ci­a­tion of In­dus­tri­al Re­search Or­gan­i­sa­tions) for fund­ing the pro­ject AiF 14194 N through a fi­nan­cial sup­port by the Fed­er­al Min­istry of Eco­nom­ic Af­fairs.

The re­search re­port is avail­able on re­quest from FRT.