Pass Boxes Are Critical For Cleanroom

A Pass Box is ideal for material movement in and out of cleanrooms, which are prone to contamination. It’s a popular material transfer hatch broadly used in pharmaceutical disciplines to avoid cross-contamination.

Pass Boxes are a critical component of cleanrooms designed as per ISO 14644 standards and typically get used in such industries to transfer materials between two controlled environments of different cleanliness classifications.Although Pass Boxes don’t provide complete material protection, they streamline material flow without the added risk of contamination.

Functions of Pass Box in a nutshell

A Pass Box works as a Material Transfer Equipment inside cleanrooms and is aimed at maintaining the ISO classification levels. In several industries, it helps smoothen up the service affairs concerning movement of crucial materials from higher cleanliness areas to lower cleanliness areas and vice versa.

In fact, facilities involving vaccine production use Pass Boxes to transfer raw materials for sterilizing, blending, and incubation in the microbiology unit in manufacturing domains. In some instances, vital equipment parts or tools get carried through pass boxes in sterile manufacturing sites.

A typical design of Pass Box comes with an interlocking system; hence, both the doors of a standard Pass Box cannot be opened simultaneously- only one door can be opened at a time while the other remains firmly closed.

Categories of Pass box

There are two categories of pass boxes: 1) Dynamic Pass Box & 2) Static Pass Box. Let’s understand both the configurations closely to understand their intended application

Dynamic Pass Box

A Dynamic Pass Box is an effective material transfer equipment that works on the principals of Laminar Air Flow in conjunction with an interlock system and helps pass material from a non-controlled environment to a controlled environment. This Pass Box comes in single or double-door configuration and gets used depending on the industry applications. In this configuration of the Pass Box, a jet of clean HEPA filtered air penetrates the transfer passage and prevents contamination from entering the other classification area of the clean room.

Static pass box

On the other hand, the Static Pass Box, also known as a Passive Pass Box, helps in material transfer between two cleanrooms of same classification levels without or with little human intervention. It’s a simple transfer hatch between two zones and contains an electromagnetic interlock between two doors. However, an LED glare from an optical control point of view indicates when a door is open.

Importance of Pass Box in sterile manufacturing processes

Apart from the application in pharmaceutical plants, aPass Box is a useful material transfer equipment in several other industries including,

Hospitals

Laboratories

Defense and Aerospace manufacturing

Precision Electronics & Semiconductor Fabs

Although personnel movement accounts for nearly 80% of all known sources of contamination in cleanroom facilities, the transfer of raw materials, tools, spares and others alike inside cleanrooms without proper material handling protocols can seriously compromise delicate manufacturing processes. Under such circumstances, the importance of Pass Boxes cannot be overlooked.

Wrapping Up

Contamination arising from material movement alone in cleanrooms can be detrimental for maintaining the integrity of products and manufacturing processes. Pass Boxes are the most preferred choice to minimize contamination risks from material handling. Kwang Purification is a renowned manufacturer of cleanroom Pass Boxes for 10 years now. So, if you are in the hospital & healthcare, pharmaceutical sector, diagnostic laboratory, or need a sterile manufacturing facility, you can consider our Pass Boxes and a range of other cleanroom equipments to maintain a safe and sterile manufacturing environment.