The Clean Manufacturing Game Part 8 of 10

Are You Playing the Clean Manufacturing Game?
A 10 part blog series discussing important aspects of clean manufacturing technology and implementation strategy.

Look, but Don’t Touch – Part 8 of 10

Contamination is a relative term and can be defined as any foreign substance contained on a surface at a level that prevents the production of reliable, complex hardware. Examples of surface contamination include particles, soils, oxidation, electrostatic charge, radioactivity, and heat. The purpose of cleaning or modifying a surface is to produce a surface free of, or with acceptable levels of, contamination.

In conventional cleaning operations, products are typically removed from a (contaminant-generating) manufacturing process (and line) at a certain point, cleaned to remove contamination to an acceptable level, inspected to verify cleanliness, and returned to the production line for further value-add manufacturing steps. Example iterations include machining-cleaning-inspection, assembling-cleaning-inspection, cleaning-inspection-bonding, and cleaning-inspection-welding. A variety of analytical methods may be employed to verify surface cleanliness, all of which generates space, labor, and transport wastes.

A new non-contact surface inspection technology called Optically Stimulated Electron Emission (OSEE) offer a unique way of addressing these manufacturing wastes. Optically Stimulated Electron Emission (OSEE) inspection is a unique CleanTech for non-invasive, non-contact analysis of surfaces to determine contamination levels. This technique utilizes a tool which utilizes ultraviolet radiation to create electron emission from a surface, resulting in a small current detected by the inspection tool. Electron emission is dependent on the substrate's surface chemistry; hence the electron emission characteristics will change with the presence of a contaminant on the surface, generally by attenuating the signal. OSEE inspection combined CO2 CleanTech is a dynamic duo that provides a number of clean manufacturing benefits.

David Jackson is President/CEO of Cleanlogix LLC and serves as the Chief Technology Officer for Cool Clean Technologies, Inc, based in Eagan, MN. He may be reached via e-mail at david.jackson@coolclean.com.

Part 9 of this series discusses robot CleanTech.