Particle Counting and The Industries That Benefit.

Today’s cleanroom requires constant monitoring in order to ensure that high quality standards are met in cleanliness protection. Using a particle counter with a data acquisition system provides up to the minute information on contaminating particles in your cleanroom, as well as data for long term studies and quality reports to your customers and your corporate management.

If you are concerned with quality, reliability, yield or compliance to regulations, then optical particle counters can help your company improve their product or the process to meet your goals and expectations. If the cleanliness (contamination by particle transfer) is important to the quality of your end product, or your process, then particle counting can provide information that is useful in controlling and improving your operation. If filtration is used in any of the steps of your process particle counting is assuredly a tool that can give you more information and control, to help you make better decisions.

Optical particle counters detect particles, and measure their size by using the interaction of the particles with a light beam. They can count and size particles ie: dust, dirt, or other particle contaminates, in air , gasses or liquids. Some of the industries that use particle counters and the reason for such are as follows:

To assure compliance to maximum particulate limits allowed in injectable drugs and capsule medicines.

During medical treatment it is important to prevent introducing particles in the bloodstream of a patient. Particles can block capillaries and interfere with normal circulation. For this reason specifications on particulate contamination are placed on not only drugs, but also on medical devices that contain fluid that will be introduced into the bloodstream. To test a device for particles it is flushed with clean water and the number of particles released can be counted, measured and evaluated.

to monitor the quality of the water delivered from the final filtration system.

to monitor the condition of oil for preventive maintenance and to improve the reliability of hydraulic systems. Semi-Conductors: to assure the cleanliness of process chemicals, where particles can kill or degrade a microelectronics chip. Aircraft and Automotive industries: to measure the cleanliness of components and sub assemblies where particles could cause failure, such as computer disk drives or in automotive anti lock braking systems.

In these applications, to name only a few, particle counters are used to monitor the process or the product and alert you to contamination problems and potential rejection possibilities.