Design of a scanning room / suite. Any advice ?

Does anyone have a design for a scanning suite / room ? I'll be building one in about 6 months and it would save me a lot of brain strain if someone clever had already designed a good layout.

It will house four flatbed scanners, 3 iQsmart3s and 1 Eversmart Supreme II. Possibly a drum scanner to come later. Also a large firesafe. The floor will be solid and cannot be used as a void for extraction, it will provide a stable base. There will be no vibration issues from traffic / lifts etc.

I am particularly interested in clean air movement, lighting, low dust flooring ( probably rubber ), extraction of cleaning fluid fumes, entrance door with no dust ingress.

Any tips will be appreciated, even if for just one element - I can combine the ideas to get my finished plan, so if you have tried something that works well please post it.

Thanks All...

Steve

Paint the walls a neutral gray. Really neutral.

Have a sticky mat on the floor before the entrance. We use these before getting in a new Gulfstream to photograph it. (And that's with taking my shoes off right before getting on the ramp.)

A good hepa filter airflow system would be helpful, preferably one worked into the heating and cooling system.

Regulate humidity.

Use a whole house style vacuum, one where the dust is collected far from your room.

Have shoes or sandals or...that never leave the clean room. Leave street shoes outside the entrance.

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Originally Posted by Peter J. De Smidt

Paint the walls a neutral gray. Really neutral.

Have a sticky mat on the floor before the entrance. We use these before getting in a new Gulfstream to photograph it. (And that's with taking my shoes off right before getting on the ramp.)

A good hepa filter airflow system would be helpful, preferably one worked into the heating and cooling system.

Regulate humidity.

Use a whole house style vacuum, one where the dust is collected far from your room.

Have shoes or sandals or...that never leave the clean room. Leave street shoes outside the entrance.

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That's a great start Peter, thanks :cool:

From your description this sounds like an industrial operation-and a high value one, at that. Don't forget fire detection/alarm and fire control. A simple smoke detector /hand-held fire extinguisher type protection system will not be adequate. You will need to consult local fire codes, and follow them. If your equipment will be powered up 24/7, and the room is currently serviced by a standard water sprinkler system, a gaseous carbon dioxide or nitrogen extinguishing system may be required for the energized electrical equipment.

While you're at it, ensure the electrical system can handle the load. GFI outlets would also be a good idea. Again, check your local codes.

I wish you the best in your endeavor!

--P

Peter is on track with his suggestions. This sounds like a serious operation. The main headaches will be dust control depending on how many people will be working at the same time. I've worked through this many times depending on the application.

A small entrance room is a hugh advantage. You enter in street clothes with sticky mat on the floor to clean the bottom of street shoes. Put on a Tyvec lab coat, booties and hair net here. Then go into the scanning room.

Arrange the scanners and mounting stations to suite but get or make plexi or acrylic covers for the scanners and mounting stations. Make sure any other equipment is in a closable cabinet and not out collecting dust. If computers are present try to keep the cooling exhaust ports away from the mounting and scanner areas. Use sticky wipes to wipe down all exposed surfaces periodically. If you can't Hepa filter the incoming air conveniently then at least use a standard pre filter. In addition you can rig nylon stocking material of finest mesh, to do additional fine filtering of incoming air. You want to try to keep a slight over pressure in the main room (and the entrance section) to exclude unfiltered air leaking in through cracks here and there.

Ideally the mounting station (s) can be placed in a laminar flow hood that is Hepa filtered and with recirculated air. Such a hood does wonders in scrubbing the whole room. Separate floor Hepas are also available. You can buy used laminar flow hoods pretty cheap - well say $500 to $2000.

Don't do chemistry in the room. But the mounting fluids are stinky solvents so you need some sort of exhaust station. It is possible to get a laminar flow/exhaust hood combination for mounting. You can even build one yourself of have one built.

If you have a concrete floor then use multi coats of epoxy sealer as an ideal and easily maintained floor cover. Secondarily vinyl tile is OK but I don't like the seams for cleanliness sake. Epoxy walls are nice but washable latex paint is OK also. The lighting needs to be enclosed, whatever you choose. If monitors are within, then choose the lighting carefully, and you might want to shade the monitors.

Consider carefully where the wall plugs need to be. Wireless computer interconnects keep clutter down but you'll have to consider interference possibilities, especially scanner to computer routings.

Follow all this and you'll not have any significant dust problems.

Nate Potter, Austin TX.

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Originally Posted by Preston

I wish you the best in your endeavor!

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Thankyou Preston. I have worked with many scanners over the years, and been amazed to see them next to open windows, in the middle of open-plan offices, tucked in the corner of a picture library etc. etc.

I've seen Scitex scanners with the filters clogged with carpet fibres, the transparency units full of fluff, and some that had been cleaned so brutally and so often that the registration prints on the glass had been worn off regularly. Operators wearing diamond rings, eating their lunch from styrofoam boxes next to the scanner, you name it, it happens.

I decided when I set up my own suite I'd do it properly, but I've never seen it done properly in order to copy it, hence my plea for best-practice examples.

Nate,

More good stuff, thanks. This is indeed a forum with some depth.

Steve

Scanners, particularly drum scanners, can generate quite a bit of heat (mine cruises at around 900W IIRC). And quite a bit of noise. And they take up quite a bit of room, and tend to be heavy. So you need to think about how you're going to get these things in and out of the room, and how you're going to supply them with electricity, and pull out the heat and fumes. All while controlling dust and noise. And the problem with using partition walls to control noise is that fabric and foam make for dust problems. Just sayin'... it's not going to be easy. But at least you are trying to plan for it, which will help immeasurably.

Oh, yes. Do make sure you have enough room around each scanner so that you can do the maintenance work that they will inevitably require. Squeezing a scanner into a corner on a table barely big enough to hold it is perhaps shortsighted. But if you have to do that, think about putting the table on casters so you'll have a more-or-less easy way to get to the back of the machine when you need to.

Finally, they tend to like lower operating temperatures, sort of like the 20C darkrooms of yore. Some of them will do over temp shutdowns when you try to run them above, say, 25C or so. Flatbeds less likely than drums, but check to find out.

Sounds effective and expensive but if you are going down that road.......

I came home from work to find one of the cats asleep on my V700 - get orfff! :D Pet hair is a real PITA

You can do a lot by controlling behaviour. For example, changing your walking speed from 2 mph to 5 mph doubles the rate at which you shed fibres and particulates.

Space is important, for maintenance as Bruce says, but also to allow an air flow behind equipment and prevent dust traps.

There's a lot of info on the web about building and maintaining cleanrooms. A lot of it is overkill for your use, but makes for useful background reading. For dust control, as others have said, an entry room where you discard your normal shoes and outer garments for clean, low-lint versions, will make a huge difference. If you can live with the dorkyness, so will a hairnet. Getting rid of paper documents, carpets, woven textile furnishings (and pets) is worth the bother too. Hepa filters in the roof blowing in, with exhaust at floor level and an overall positive pressure is the usual arrangment.

Finally, if you're buying new scanners, get new computers and other peripherals to go with them (or valet the insides with a non-static vacuum cleaner). The amount of lint in a typical few-months old computer that has been in a normal office is truly disgusting :-)