Laminar flow enclosures and biological safety cabinets illustrate differences in airflow management as it pertains to the types of procedures conducted within them.

Laminar flow enclosures are used when process protection is paramount in applications wherein the operator and lab environment are not exposed to hazardous chemical or biological agents. Capture of airborne contaminants such as dust or microbes is crucial to successfully performing sterile compounding and intravenous bag mixing, optics and semiconductor wafer manufacturing, and cell culture media preparation, to name a few. Mystaire offers the MY-ISO 5 Vertical Laminar Flow Workstation and the CleanPrep+ Horizontal Laminar Flow Clean Bench for these procedures. The difference between these two products lies in laboratory air being drawn from the top of the workstation or from the rear of the clean bench. In each case, the laboratory air is subsequently filtered through HEPA filters, allowing clean air to flow in nonturbulent, parallel layers either vertically or horizontally over the process and out of the front sash. Both products are rated at ISO-5, from ISO-14644 2020 (equivalent to FED-STD 209E Class 100), which specifies the total number of particles of sizes ranging from 0.1 μm to 1 μm per cubic meter after filtration. As an example, unfiltered office air is classified as ISO-9 with 35,200,000 particles per cubic meter at ≥ 0.5 μm, while ISO-5 provides 10,000 times fewer particles. Read More >