Investigating the Performance of a Minienvironment System

A minienvironment is a localized environment created by an enclosure to isolate a product or process from the surrounding environment. Minienvironments have been gaining popularity to provide effective containment for critical contamination control. The use of minienvironments can provide several orders of magnitude improvement in particle cleanliness levels, while energy intensity may be shifted from the conventional cleanroom systems to the minienvironments that enclose the specific process. The purpose of this paper is to study the energy performance of a minienvironment air system in a ballroom setting, to quantify power density of such a system, and to identify areas for energy savings from high-performance minienvironments.