The process of wearing, laundering and sterilising reusable cleanroom garments can impact their physical properties and change garment functionality. Laundering and wear abrade garment fibres. Simultaneously, changes to the polymers that make up the garments can occur at the molecular level. Although routine visual inspection is often part of garment quality evaluation programmes, non-visible properties also change with time.
When selecting reusable garments for use in cleanroom environments, it is important to understand how they will perform over their intended life cycle. Consideration of these properties should be part of the decision process for when to take reusable garments out of service.
Physical property data are often available for new cleanroom garments; however, there are less data available throughout the entire garment life cycle. To aid in garment choice, DuPont conducted a study of the physical properties of reusable cleanroom garments after a set number of laundering and gamma radiation exposure (sterilisation) cycles.
The results are outlined here.
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