[geeks] E3K airflow

[Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez]

On Tue, 27 Jan 2004, Brian Dunbar wrote:
> I've only been in four myself - but they were all on the same site,
> same company.  And one doesn't count as it was only a 'gown, booties
> and mask room, not the full blown one with airlocks.  It was explained
> to me that (and this has been a few years and the memory suffers) that
> a positive airflow was maintained to keep the nasty bits going in their
> natural direction (down).  I recall that there were curtains of air
> blasting down at points where you had to walk through into different
> sections, and a less powerful but noisy -whoosh- adjacent to the
> workstations where their fans would emit dust.  And I _know_ that the
> service areas behind the works, but in the clean room (reminded me of
> Jeffries tubes from Star Trek) had a gale-like force blasting along and
> down - they weren't much fun to be in.

At least the workstations I was working on, the computers were mostly
shielded up in weird enclosures, but this was a relatively new room. I
have seen older rooms that would have old PCs and whatnot (lots of PS2 for
some reason) out in the open. I assume there will be different types of
rooms, but I guess that their airflow is designed with dust and nasty
chemicals floating removal in mind than heat removal. I remember that in
between sections you'd have to go through some "Air tunnel" but I do not
remember it blowing down, more than blowing the shit out of me in every
direction. If anything it reminded me of the airlocks in the moon base of
Ariplane 2 :). Swwwwooooosshshhh

Also once I got aware about the shit that was in the air, those places are
anything but "clean", sure there may be no dust but there is risk of being
exposed to some nasty stuff. Because as far as I was told they had to
recycle a lot of the air since they could not just evacuate it out into
the open. I think that tere was some class action lawsuit by IBM workers
due to their abnormal cancer rates. In any case being inside a clean room
was one of the highlights of my geek carreer :).

> Perhaps we're talking about diffrn't terms?  I said circulation when
> what I'm probably talking about was the system that removed the gunk
> from the environment.  You're talking about cooling.

Yah, I think you are correct I was thinking more in the lines of airflow
as in heat removal (due to the E3K weird cooling).