Post-Formed Plastic Panels for Aseptic Clean Room Walls
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current modular panel systems for clean rooms face challenges such as manual manufacturing leading to inconsistent quality, high production costs, and environmental hazards due to toxic materials, limiting their use to small areas and making future extensions costly and difficult.
Innovation Solution
A modular construction system using post-formed plastic panels with a perimeter profile and filling material for thermal insulation, allowing for uniform connections and assembly without on-site polishing or painting, and incorporating corner pieces for seamless joints, ensuring aseptic and hermetic conditions.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of manufacture
If manual manufacturing methods are used for clean room panels, then flexibility in production is maintained, but manufacturing precision and quality consistency deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The panel manufacturing process is segmented into distinct components: a core board providing structural support, and separate surface sheets that are laminated to the core. This segmentation allows each component to be manufactured independently with controlled precision, then assembled through lamination to achieve consistent final product quality without requiring entirely manual fabrication of the entire panel.
Solution Approach 2:
The panel employs a composite structure combining a core board material with surface sheet materials that are laminated together. This composite construction enables the integration of different material properties - the core provides structural integrity while the surface sheets provide smooth, cleanable surfaces - and allows each layer to be manufactured with appropriate precision controls before being combined into the final consistent-quality panel.
2Device complexity
If traditional panel systems with joints and edges are used, then construction simplicity is maintained, but aseptic conditions and cleaning effectiveness deteriorate due to living corners and discontinuities
Solution Approach 1:
The panel design incorporates rounded corners instead of sharp 90-degree angles at the intersections of adjacent panels. This curvature eliminates the creation of 'living corners' where dust, moisture, and contaminants could accumulate in traditional joint configurations. The rounded geometry maintains ease of construction through standardized panel assembly while ensuring continuous smooth surfaces that meet aseptic requirements and allow effective cleaning without discontinuities.
3Productivity
If fiberglass panels with manual molding are used, then initial production capability is achieved, but productivity and manufacturing precision deteriorate due to operator dependency
Solution Approach 1:
The manufacturing process uses a master mold or template that defines the precise geometry and surface characteristics of the panel. Multiple panels are produced by replicating this master pattern through the lamination process, ensuring that each panel is a copy of the standardized design. This copying approach eliminates operator dependency for each individual panel fabrication, maintaining consistent surface quality and dimensional accuracy across high production volumes.
Solution Approach 2:
The invention transitions from manual fiberglass molding where quality depended on operator skill to a controlled lamination process where parameters such as heat, pressure, and material composition are standardized. By changing the manufacturing parameters from craft-based manual techniques to controlled industrial lamination parameters, the process achieves both high productivity and uniform manufacturing precision across all produced panels.
4Ease of manufacture
If panels requiring on-site polishing and painting are used, then initial construction cost is reduced, but loss of time and productivity deteriorate due to additional on-site work
Solution Approach 1:
The panels are manufactured with their final smooth, cleanable surface finish applied during the factory lamination process before installation. The surface sheets are laminated to the core board in a controlled manufacturing environment, completing all necessary finishing operations beforehand. This preliminary action eliminates the need for time-consuming on-site polishing and painting activities, allowing panels to be installed directly and reducing construction schedule delays while maintaining cost effectiveness.
Applied Scientific Principles
This section explains which scientific principles are used to turn an abstract innovation direction into a practical engineering solution.
Function Achieved in This Case
The system achieves consistent, durable, and easily assembled panels that maintain aseptic conditions, reducing production delays and costs, and allows for flexible panel heights and easy extensions while minimizing environmental impact.
Implementation Method 1
a perimeter profile with a continuous central groove, which together with the flat surfaces of the post-formed roofs confines a filling material with which thermal, acoustic insulation or some other required characteristic can be obtained
Data Source
AI summary
The present invention relates to the construction industry, and in particular to laboratories, hospitals, food production areas and other places where asepsis is required. Specifically, it relates to a modular construction system based on self-supporting panels, which have post-formed exterior surfaces and are complemented with corner components of similar construction to build hermetic, waterproof and insulating walls that have smooth surfaces. For this, there is a modular system of panels for forming aseptic spaces within an enclosure and a method of installing a clean room wall by means of a modular system of panels to form aseptic spaces inside an enclosure.