The case for modular conveyors

Cleanroom production lies at the heart of many of the world’s leading industries. These include pharmaceutical, medical, semiconductor and, if current events are any guide, solar power—now just beginning to emerge as a worldwide technological mainstay. The clean industrial environment can encompass the entire assembly/manufacturing process, leaving only packing and shipping to be done in a non-cleanroom area, or the manufacturer can isolate only certain facets of the process as a cleanroom environment. Increasingly, the trend has been toward the latter approach, due to cost savings and flexibility—a solar panel manufacturer, for example, may have production processes with cleanroom requirements ranging anywhere from Class 1 to Class 100,000. The simplest way to do this is to take a modular approach, in which each manufacturing step requiring a clean environment is treated as a self-contained process. Each process station can then be operated within the appropriate cleanroom specifications. In solar panel assembly, for example, wafer production, cell production, and module production all have different cleanroom requirements (Table 1). These requirements further vary within each production area, depending on the process.

The modular approach to cleanroom conveying offers numerous advantages for manufacturers such as increased flexibility, reduced costs, and the ability to take a more proactive approach to changes in technology or levels of demand.