Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1243344
MAY 2020 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 83 not going to have to do anything differently because it's a filter, it has to be however you would have processed that material. Johnson: Is it fair to assume that if a company is working with that material already that they've also set up an appropriate channel for disposal? Then they would use the same chan- nel? Mitchell: Right. I'm not adding complexity to that because that system would have already existed for what they were working with. Johnson: What do you currently see as the big- gest challenges for electronics manufacturers in managing fume extraction and the breath- able air quality in their work environment? Mitchell: I guess I would say the cost justifica- tion of filtering the air versus throwing it outside. Johnson: Right. You have some major com- petitors that toss it outside, and if that's good enough, then that's good enough. Mitchell: It's "good enough as long as nobody complains," they say. And then, once some- body complains, they start looking at alterna- tives. There are cost justifications; you have to dig a little deeper sometimes to find those, though. Take the example of manufacturing in Arizona. During blistering hot summers, you're spending all this money to get the air temperature down in your facility to a manage- able level where people are comfortable, and then you have a bunch of holes in your ceil- ing where you're pouring that conditioned air out of the building with fans helping to pull it out of the building. Now, I have to pull new air into the building, re-cool it, and send it back out to the building. Where if you hook this up to a local exhaust ventilator, you're not throw- ing the air out of the building; you're going to pull it through these filters and exhaust it back into the building. Johnson: It's the same thing for preserving the heat inside for the colder climates, too. Mitchell: Exactly. That's a more difficult cal- culation to make of how much that's costing you. Maybe less obvious would be the way to say it. Another advantage you have with local exhaust ventilation is—especially with elec- tronics manufacturing—when you put a plant together and run it for six months, and then your product mix or volume changes, you're like, "I wish I had realigned or moved this line differently and had this oven over on a differ- ent side of the building, or even 30 feet away from where it is now." If you're venting out of the building, you're calling the HVAC com- pany, and they have to come and run a new line, or possibly even punch a new hole in the ceiling or a wall. If you run local exhaust ven- tilation, you unplug it from the wall, you roll it to where you want it now, and you plug it back into the wall for power. Johnson: Do any of your products have sen- sors to monitor what's in the air or any metrics about the air quality going into the air filters? Mitchell: No, there's not a before and after. There's a sensor you can add into the exhaust BOFA's V250 Fume & Dust Extraction System.