When clean just isn’t clean enough

Cold rooms can be furnished in many ways – and to various degrees of cleanliness: from the uncontrolled UC classification via the CNC base solution (Control Not Classified) to the D, C, B, and finally A classification, indicating the highest degree of cleanliness. At Xellia’s production facilities, Artelia have explored the possibility of making ‘clean’ even cleaner.

In its essence, the project’s purpose was to construct a new cold room for finished pharmaceutical products. This type of room would normally be built as a CNC room. However, this necessitates the need to change shoes and wear a hairnet when entering and exiting. Additionally, all products need to be cleaned every time they are moved in or out. Xellia wished to simplify that process.

“It’s all about flow. When a door to a cold room is opened, the temperature changes. As soon as you breach the cooling, the general conditions change, both temperature and humidity. If people enter the room, it is potentially contaminated with KIM particles from their skin. The air then needs to be filtered and renewed. What’s special about the new Xellia cold room is that we’ve constructed it in class C, something that to my knowledge has never been done before,” explains Artelia project manager, Steffen Højmann.

In the new cold room, the air flow is continually renewed, whilst the room simultaneously is cooled to the desired temperature. Steffen Højmann and his team have managed to do this by extending a laminar cloth across the ceiling, effectively cutting the room in half. The area under the cloth is cleaned several times per day, while the area above only requires maintenance perhaps once every year. This implies a substantial cost reduction in operations management.