What is Clean Manufacturing?
In the simplest terms - It's manufacturing things in a clean environment, ensuring the highest standards of cleanliness, not just about hygiene, but precision, safety, and replicability.
Clean Manufacturing involves creating controlled environments that minimise contamination and ensure the highest quality outcomes.
But what exactly does this entail? CEO and Co-Director of Aryium, Sarah Borg-Bonnici sheds light on this essential practice.
Understanding Clean Manufacturing
Clean Manufacturing is about more than just spotless surfaces. As Sarah explains:
"Clean rooms come in different rates, up to so clean I not only could eat my lunch off the floor, but eating my lunch off the floor would degrade the clean room to a point that the clean room is no longer clean anymore. A little bit facetious, but quite accurate."
The essence of clean manufacturing lies in controlling the environment to prevent any form of contamination. This involves monitoring biological particulates, dust, and other particles that could interfere with sensitive processes. Sarah emphasises:
"What you're doing when you're looking at clean rooms is the amount of stuff in the air. There are times when you're looking at the amount of biological stuff, you know, biological particulates in the space. There are times when you're looking at dust type stuffs in the space."
Clean manufacturing environment
The Cost of Cleanliness
Maintaining clean environments is not just technically challenging but also expensive. The effort involves advanced filtration systems, specialised equipment, and rigorous training for personnel. Sarah points out:
"Clean rooms are extremely expensive because really the main way that we find out how to, you know, keep these rooms as clean as possible is that we try to keep the human isolated from the room because as a Biocontainment expert once told me - “Humans bags of germs” - and he is not 100% incorrect."
This necessity leads to various grades of clean rooms, from reasonably clean to ultra-clean environments. The level of cleanliness required depends on the specific needs of the manufacturing process:
"So, we've got a series of different types of them, and they can be ones that are like, you know, clean-ish, reasonably clean, damn clean, very clean. When you're dealing with the very clean types on environments, you try to keep people as far out of the equation as possible, this is where the industry turns to automation and robotics."
The Role of Automation
Automation and robotics play a crucial role in maintaining clean manufacturing standards by reducing human interaction, which is a primary source of contamination.
Clean manufacturing environment with automation and robotics
However, this introduces new challenges:
"What's interesting though, is understanding how you produce clean robots, because anything that moves generates particulates. There's a whole field of fascinating research around this area, and there's a predictability to what reasonable amount predictability to what will be shed. But the minute you start going into robotics and automation, there are other problems and you may need other ways of looking at things."
Sarah also notes:
"Clean manufacturing isn't so much about improving it in terms of automation and robotics. It's more about creating an environment that enables whatever you're doing in it to be replicable and successfully replicable. And automation and robotics is only something that sits in parallel to that because you could do that in a filthy environment, or you could do that in a super clean environment."
How can Aryium help?
Aryium stands ready to support your clean manufacturing projects at any stage. However, early involvement can provide significant advantages. Sarah explains:
"We want to start with the end in mind. We want to define that problem properly. If the problem has already been partly defined, but some questions haven't been asked often. And, you know, we must go back and revisit the fundamental basis of the problem."
Aryium's expertise ensures that projects are aligned with the highest standards, potentially making processes less capital-intensive and more efficient. Our cross-industry experience allows for innovative solutions that borrow best practices from various fields:
"And once we've defined the problem, we can find that potentially some of the design that may have already been carried out before is not necessarily in alignment the problem. And we don't define the problem in isolation. We define it with the client."
Building Lasting Relationships
For Aryium, it's not just about completing a project—it's about building lasting relationships based on trust and shared goals. Sarah passionately states:
"We want to help and we're more than happy to have, you know, conversations and zero cost to you at least, you know, to start finding out things because we want to build relationships with good people and we want to be around for a very long-time doing work with fantastic people."
Clean Manufacturing is a critical aspect of modern production, ensuring that high-precision, high-quality products are created in contaminant-free environments. With Aryium's support, companies can achieve their manufacturing goals efficiently and effectively, maintaining the highest standards of cleanliness and replicability.