Both academic and commercial cleanroom operators use fume hoods for a variety of tasks, but the underlying reasons remain the same. These are important safety devices that help protect equipment and personnel against dangerous gases that result from the combination of multiple chemicals. Investing in a new fume hood could be what leads to a new discovery or project breakthrough in your scientific lab. Take a look at the following three use cases, and you’re likely to see something that resembles your organization’s own operations.
1. Fabrication Work
Perhaps the most common chore inside technology-focused cleanrooms involves semiconductor fabrication. Technicians who work in this field rely on fabrication fume hoods that remove any of the excess compounds used as reagents when doing this kind of manufacturing. The proliferation of new technologies has put additional pressure on laboratories around the world to increase their output by entire orders of magnitude. In spite of this, cleanroom managers are insisting on basic safety precautions as a way of ensuring that their staffers don’t run into any dangerous situations. That’s actually become commonplace in even the most experimental settings, which leads straight into the next potential use case.
2. Protecting Staffers
Regulators often require the use of high-end professional fume hood equipment in order to provide a stable working situation for anyone who provides services in a particular lab. Breathing in almost any kind of toxic compound can be seriously dangerous, and some of these could lead to debilitating injuries. Lab managers often check that all of their fume hoods are in use whenever something in a cleanroom might be venting this kind of exhaust. For that matter, they might even insist on their use whenever a reaction generates a strong odor. Offensive smells can often be as bad as actual toxic compounds, which means they should be treated with the same degree of caution, regardless of what specific rules are laid down in a manual.
3. Regular Maintenance
Some people use their fume hoods during regular maintenance periods so that any foul odors get sucked straight out of the cleanroom. Others run it for the same reason during this time because even the slightest amount of outside matter could tamper with delicate manufacturing or scientific workflows. Keep in mind that cleaning compounds tend to be quite caustic. When these interact with other fluids in a laboratory, there’s always a chance that they could trip a sensor or spoil an experiment. Simply switching on the fume hoods that are already in place will stop this from happening while simultaneously making it much easier to work in that sort of environment.
If any of these look familiar but you haven’t been using a fume hood personally, then there’s no better time than now to invest in one. Make sure that you get units that are large enough to cover the area in question. By providing some additional exhaust pressure, you can dramatically reduce the risk of toxic compounds making their way back into your workshop. Academic operators might even have to do so because of the various regulatory bodies they need to work alongside.