The special products facility of a major pharmaceutical company was manufacturing products using powders in highly toxic concentrations. They needed an efficient way to filter the air exiting the facility to ensure optimal health and safety of the outside environment. The air coming in was not a problem, but the air going out had to be filtered to remove all traces of powdered drugs. The simple solution was to use a HEPA filter, but what would then happen if that filter failed? Therein lay the challenge….
Pure Ingenuity designed a return air plenum that involved a floor-level louvered door to pull the dirty air in, and two sets of HEPA filters within the plenum to make a safe filter system, as air was drawn up and out of the room through the floor-level grill in the plenum. The innovative design featured two filters in series with a sampling system in between that would instantaneously detect filter failure. When trace amounts of the hazardous powder were detected on the “filtered” side of the HEPA filters, the system immediately flagged the failed filter requiring replacement on the monitoring system. In order to bypass the time-consuming task of swapping out difficult-to-access HEPA filters, Pure Ingenuity designed a unique drawer-style easy-in, easy-out system that allowed the filter to be replaced in less than two minutes, with the use of a simple hand wrench tool only.
As a result of the new design, the company met strict health and safety regulations, while ensuring minimal downtime in the event of a filter failure.
