Cleanroom pass-through chambers, also known as pass-through boxes, are a crucial part of maintaining a sterile, efficient working environment. Despite this, many biotech, medical, engineering, and research industry businesses overlook cleanroom pass-throughs while placing all their focus on the cleanroom itself.
A pass-through box can be a powerful tool to reduce cross-contamination and make the preparation process for moving materials into a cleanroom easier.
At Prudential Overall Supply (Prudential Cleanroom Services), we’ve become experts in supporting sterile working environments while providing businesses with reusable supplies needed to maintain their cleanrooms and business operations. From cleanroom uniforms and goggles to reusable cleaning products (mops), we understand the attention to detail and dedication to standard protocols required to keep a cleanroom effective.
So, whether you’re a small business looking to improve your operation or a large enterprise in need of additional hygiene and contamination-prevention measures, here’s everything you need to know about cleanroom pass-throughs and how they can help your business.
What Is a Cleanroom Pass-Through Chamber?
A cleanroom pass-through chamber is a specialized enclosure like a box or tunnel designed to facilitate the movement of material or equipment between rooms of differing sterility and cleanliness. Most pass-through boxes are built into cleanroom walls, making it easy for one employee to place an object in the box and seal it from their side, while another opens their end and retrieves it into the cleanroom.
There are many types of pass-through chambers available, and each can be built in custom sizes and layouts to better meet the requirements of your cleanroom environment.
In most cases, a cleanroom pass-through will be constructed with a stainless-steel frame and feature either manual or automatic vertical sliding pass-through windows. While manual stainless steel pass-through chambers can be effective, automatic chambers are always the better choice, as they ensure only one door can be opened at a time.
Beyond the easily cleaned stainless steel and airtight construction, pass-through chambers are usually also equipped with high-quality gaskets and seals to prevent contamination from outside, as well as powerful HEPA filters to remove airborne contaminants from the material or object being transferred.
Sometimes, wall-mounted pass-through chambers can even be equipped with solvent dispensers or sprayers to sanitize any materials being moved through it before opening the receiving side’s door.
Benefits of Pass-Through Chambers in Cleanroom Environments
Installing a pass-through chamber in your cleanroom is a great way to improve the conditions of the cleanroom itself while minimizing the risk of contamination. Pass-through chambers achieve this by:
Reducing Foot Traffic
Without a cleanroom pass-through, working materials and equipment would have to be carried into a cleanroom by an employee. The more foot traffic a cleanroom experiences, the greater the chance for contamination, and the less sterile the environment becomes.
With a cleanroom pass-through, everything a worker inside the cleanroom may require can be given to them through the pass-through box. By reducing foot traffic within the cleanroom, you can have a more certain guarantee of the hygiene and sterility of the cleanroom space.
Saving Space
Instead of having to store all your necessary material and equipment in the cleanroom, thus making the inside environment feel cluttered and hard to navigate, a cleanroom pass-through allows you to store these objects outside and access them quickly when required. This not only makes the cleanroom safer, but it also improves working conditions for those inside and, therefore, overall employee happiness and productivity.
Saving Time and Boosting Productivity
Beyond improving employee morale and productivity, a cleanroom pass-through reduces the need for workers inside the cleanroom to exit the space to fetch something, and then have to suit up, and enter the cleanroom again. These processes can take up a significant amount of time and cut into the time workers could be spending on the tasks they are needed for.
Installing pass-through boxes eliminates this obstacle, helping workers complete tasks faster and more easily than before.
Increasing Cleanroom Safety
Without the unnecessary foot traffic and movement of personnel into and out of the cleanroom, the risk for contamination is significantly lowered. Beyond this, cleanroom pass-throughs can also be equipped with advanced safety features like key card readers, fingerprint or iris scanners, and automatic sterilization tools to ensure material entering and exiting the cleanroom is controlled and sterile at all times.
Cleaning Easily
Most cleanroom pass-throughs are made using stainless steel, which is easy to clean and extremely durable. Depending on the design of the box, moving parts and other elements may be protected behind a double wall, simplifying cleaning even further by removing the need to sterilize these mechanical parts daily.
Making Cleanroom Pass-Throughs and Hygiene Work for You
Cleanrooms and their pass-through chambers vary greatly in size, layout, design, and construction. As these elements are useful across a range of industries, the customization options are nearly endless.
Choosing a cleanroom pass-through design that matches your cleanroom environment and the needs of your workers is essential should you wish to take full advantage of the benefits we’ve listed above.
At Prudential, we have decades of experience offering businesses like yours cleanroom uniforms and suits and reusable cleaning products. We know the cleanroom business inside out.
So whether you’re considering adding a cleanroom pass-through to your workspace, or need help improving your cleanroom cleanliness standards, get in touch with us today to get the help you need.