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68 SMT Magazine • August 2015 ArtICle by Stefan Meissner ulT ag Capturing and Filtering of Airborne Substances is Anything but Simple Occupational health and safety in manufac- turing companies have become increasingly im- portant in recent years. Today it should be seen as a part of the job rather than an annoyance. Manufacturing processes have gained in com- plexity, and resulting pollutants have become smaller and particularly more exotic. "From chipping come chips" is a popular saying. To- day, the chips cannot be seen with the naked eye any longer since particle size of resulting dust and smoke has arrived in the nano range. Pollutants of any size always affect humans, machines and the environment. In addition to social and human aspects, a high sickness ab- sence rate of employees has adverse economic effects on a company just like malfunctioning machines due to pollutions. Maintenance ex- penses, rework and finally loss of reputation and falling demand are the predominant ad- verse effects. reducing risks to employees' Health with extraction and Filtration technology These factors lead to a rising demand for extraction and filtration technology, which reli- ably protects equipment and employee health, and furthermore, takes account of changing process parameters. By now, extraction and filtration technol- ogy covers a wide range of airborne substances. Nearly all processes to be found in the manu- facturing industry are supported. From inter- connection and separation technologies, sur- face processing such as drilling, sintering and milling, the utilisation of fluxes or production processes such as 3D printing or rapid prototyp- ing by means of laser, soldering and gluing — all these processes generate harmful substances that might show extreme impact on health. Lasers are increasingly utilised in metal and plastics processing (e.g., drilling, welding, cut- ting, engraving, sintering, etc.). For example, in metal processing dusts containing heavy met- als are released that may accumulate in the hu- man body. During processing of alloyed metals, contained substances such as nickel, cobalt and chromium are released. The pyrolysis of organic substances may generate dioxins or hydrogen