Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1243344
78 SMT007 MAGAZINE I MAY 2020 with all the wet chemistries and the like. Do you have much presence in the printed circuit board fab facilities? Mitchell: Not anything significant, and the wet part is the reason. The filtering technology we use doesn't like to get wet. We can take the gas vapor coming off of those processes, but if it's enough of a vapor that it's going to condense back into any kind of liquid, it gets out of our main work area. We do get into the compo- nent side of it. There are a lot of applications in that, and most of those are dealing with lasers of some kind. Johnson: Right, such as vaporizing a lot of solid materials. Tell me a little bit about the technology for doing what you do and manag- ing those sorts of fumes and vaporized items. What are the concerns? Mitchell: At its simplest description, we create airflow with a motor blower, or some people call them pumps, that makes the airflow that draws the air from whatever area you're cre- ating this material you want to filter. Let's say it's a laser and you're going to create enough airflow to draw the air from the laser, hold it into the extractor, and then it goes through typically three phases of filtration, which the first phase is a pre-filter—typically something around a 95% efficiency at 0.8 microns. Rela- tively speaking, we'd call those the larger par- ticulates. It's going to capture those in the pre- filter. The reason for the pre-filter is it's going to take out most of the bigger stuff so that when you get to the next stage—which is the HEPA filter—you'll have less material going into it because HEPA filters tend to be more expen- sive, so you don't want them getting clogged up with large particulate that you can capture in a pre-filter first. HEPA filters are 99.997% efficient at 0.3 microns, which is kind of the magic number people are worried about with the particulate size getting caught in your lungs and blood- stream, potentially causing a health hazard. The HEPA filter is designed to capture that material, and that's your second stage. The third stage is going to be activated carbon, and that's what's going to capture the gas and the odor mainly of the material you're working from. A lot of our extractors have two physical filters: the main filter case contains both the HEPA and the carbon. The prefilter is a sep- arate filter case. There are two physical filter cases, but it's looked at as three stages of fil- tration. The entire extractor is going to have the pump that creates the airflow built into that; the electronics that control the settings, the speed of your pump, and then your filters are all put into the same extractor that allows you to have everything fully contained. Essentially, you plug this into a power source and connect a hose from wherever the source of the partic- ulate or fume is generated. More than half of the products that we're offering are being used at 120 volts. We have some of our larger units that require 220 volts, and we have one signifi- cantly larger unit that's 440 volts. Then, the hose runs back into the extrac- tor, so it pulls everything into that and vents it back out generally into the room. You could add a port to it to vent it out somewhere else FumeCAB 700 ESD cabinet fume extraction solution for a broad range of anti-static applications.