What Cleanroom Supply Item is Most Critical?

If you have ever found yourself preparing to place a critical environment consumable order, it is likely you have wondered what's the most important cleanroom disposable? What consumable should I be most concerned with? Should it be my garment, glove, or wiper selection?
The direct answer: They are all equally important! The reason they are all so important is because your cleanroom consumables work together as a system; they are all interlinked. Apparel, gloves, and wipers all have the potential to make direct contact with your critical process and/or product. Therefore, if you have one weak link your whole system might breakdown. In order to understand how all of your cleanroom consumables work together, imagine you have the following items:

• A polyester wiper with a pressure heat-sealed edge. The benefit of the heat-sealed edge is that no particles can be released from it, so this is clearly a low-particle, very clean wiper.

• An engineered fabric microporous garment. The engineered fabric laminated with a clean outer layer to ensure it is ESD safe, and non-linting.

• Blue dyed nitrile gloves. While these might be common, are they cleanroom compatible? No. People use them because they don't know any better. The danger in blue dyed gloves is that the pigment can, and eventually will, leach out. Additionally, the pigment negatively affects the tensile strength, elasticity, and chemical compatibility of the glove.

Back to the question of what's the most important cleanroom consumables. Is it the wiper, the apparel, or the gloves?  It does very little good to use a great cleanroom wiper and have a rigorous garment system when you have a glove that is going to cause potential contamination in your controlled environment. 
Valutek offers three “matched-set” of cleanroom product lines that are engineered for the three different cleanroom class critical environments. Namely MacroTek, Cleanroom Class 10,000+ (ISO 7+); MicroTek, Cleanroom Class 100-1000 (ISO 5-6); NanoTek, Cleanroom Class 1-10 (ISO 3-4). In each product line, there are compatible cleanroom supplies for your specific controlled environment. Browse our catalog online to find your ideal cleanroom comsumable set.