Imminent changes to ISO cleanroom standards

Steve Ward is the Managing Director of  Validair Diamond Scientific. He’s also a committee member and Secretary of the Contamination Control Network (CCN) and is on the ISO TC209 Working Group (WG4) for the much-anticipated updates to ISO 14644-4. Who better to provide valuable insight into the forthcoming changes.

Steve has written an article (published by CCN) that talks about the forthcoming changes. As he states in the article, BS EN ISO 14644-4 2001 has been one of the key documents in the cleanroom standards family since its publication over 20 years ago and needs to be brought in line with current best practices. The transformed standard was issued as a Draft International Standard (DIS) in Q4 2021 for public review and comment.

Whilst no confirmed statement can be made as to what the final content of the new standard will be, the DIS is a good measure of what it is likely to look like. Salient points of the update could therefore include an extended scope to cover additional cleanliness attributes, more mandatory elements to consider and information on calculating efficient airflow rates for maintaining cleanliness.

The layout of the DIS covers Requirements, Design, Construction and Start-Up, with each having a related Annex that provides additional informative guidance. “This is intended to make the document flow in a more chronological order, in line with a typical cleanroom construction project,” Steve explains, concluding that: “It feels like a more helpful tool for cleanroom owners, designers, constructors and verifiers.”

Read Steve Ward’s article on CCN here.