Mr. Clean

Scientists at the Sandia Corp. in Albuquerque, where nuclear weapons are designed and assembled, have a passion for cleanliness. They have to. As weapons components are made smaller and still smaller, the presence of a single particle of dust can make larger and still larger trouble. The strictest housekeeper in all Sandia is Texas-born Physicist Willis J. Whitfield, creator of the Whitfield Ultra-Clean Room. "I thought about dust particles," he says with a slight drawl. "Where are these rascals generated? Where do they go?" Once he answered his own questions Physicist Whitfield decided that conventional industrial clean rooms are wrong in principle.

The usual system in clean rooms, which are necessary for an ever-increasing number of industrial operations, is to keep dust particles from being released. Smoking is forbidden; so are ordinary pencils, which give off graphite particles. People who work in the clean rooms are "packaged" in special boots, hoods and coveralls and are vacuum-cleaned before they enter. The rooms themselves are vacuumed continually. But despite all these precautions, each cubic foot of their air still contains at least 1,000,000 dust particles that are .3 microns (.000012 in.) or larger in diameter. This is a vast improvement over ordinary air, but Whitfield was sure he could do better. Abandoning the idea of keeping dust particles from being generated, he decided to remove them as soon as they appear.

The Whitfield Ultra-Clean Room looks like a small metal house trailer without wheels. Its floor is metal grating. It is lined with stainless steel, and along one wall the workbench faces a 4-ft. by 10-ft. bank of "absolute filters" that remove all particles above .3 microns from a slow stream of air. Most clean rooms use their filters simply to clean up incoming air. Whitfield's trick is to make the clean air from the filters keep the room clean. It flows at 1 m.p.h. (a very faint breeze) across the workbench and past the people working at it. Workmen can dress in ordinary clothes and smoke if they desire. Dandruff, tobacco smoke, pencil dust and any other particles generated are carried away by the clean air, whisked down through the grating floor, and discharged outdoors. Every six seconds the room gets a change of ultra-clean air. No particles get a chance to circulate, and as a result, Physicist Whitfield's room is at least 1,000 times as clean as the cleanest of its competitors.

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