IEST revise practice on characterising outgassed organic compounds
Industries challenged by adverse production yields due to volatile and semi-volatile organic compounds could benefit from revised recommended practice published by the US-based Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technology (IEST).
The document – ‘IEST-RP-CC031.2: Method for Characterizing Outgassed Organic Compounds from Cleanroom Materials and Components’ –provides both a semiquantitative determination and a qualitative identification of a large range of compounds.
The method is designed to screen primarily cleanroom materials but can also be applied to materials used in other controlled environments for identification of outgassed compounds detectable by dynamic headspace gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS).
In the semiconductor industry, the deposition of outgassed compounds on hardware, products, and wafer surfaces is recognised as a source of processing problems and hardware failures. In aerospace, the presence of molecular contamination can significantly degrade spacecraft performance goals and hasten end-of-life projections.