Daw completes latest phase of cleanrooms at Europa Magnetics with a large new building used for the manufacture of CD-Rs
Having proved to be a successful partner in previous recent expansions at Europa Magnetics's Cramlington Plant, north of Newcastle, Daw Technologies has just completed the design and build of a massive new cleanroom on a greenfield site. Representing a œ25 million investment by Europa's parent, Taiwanese company, CMC, the new building is 6500m2.
Of this, 1000m2 is given over to administrative activity with the remainder dedicated to cleanrooms and support areas.
This latest plant follows on from previous assembly plants on the same site. The new facility is a one-stop CDR (recordable media) manufacturing plant, while its predecessors produce floppy disks and CD-Roms.
Daw Technologies was involved in the design and build of clean rooms at both the earlier facilities and no other company was asked to tender for this contact.
Plant manager Alex Pyott explained: "The plant has been finished for some time, but we have been concentrating on optimising the lines and commissioning the specialist equipment which has come from all over the world.
"The clean room is currently two thirds full, with 18 lines capable of producing 16 million CDRs per month.
"We have 240 people staffing this operation together with 25 support personnel and this looks set to increase, as we expect to increase the number of production lines to 24.
"We worked closely with Daw on both the design and specification of our latest building.
"Brian Cormack and his team helped us meet our seemingly contradictory wish of achieving as open and airy space as possible with, at the same time, a high number of production tools".
As the building was leased, none of the services for the clean room could be suspended from the building's fabric, which was built by the main contractor. Daw therefore incorporated a steelwork system to act as a conduit for the necessary ductwork and process equipment.
In this way, a platform criss crossing the cleanroom ceiling was created. "The heat given off by 42 injection moulding machines is considerable," said Robert Denholm, Daw's engineering service manager.
"Therefore we had to install an air exchange system capable of dissipating the heat not only from that number of machines, but from a projected further eighteen".
As a result, the quality of air in the cleanroom is significantly higher that that required for a class 10,000 clean room.
In addition, the dye manufacturing area holds a 1000 classification.
Another interesting feature of the new facility is the prevalence of powerful, multi jet, hepa filtered air showers.
Used extensively in Asia, the management of Europa has found them to be highly effective in removing microscopic dust particles from the protective suits worn by their staff.
If even one particle were to find its way into some of the machinery in the cleanroom, it could result in a batch of CDRs being rejected. CMC has 11 CDR factories across Taiwan, with additional plants in Mexico, Ireland, China and Hong Kong.
However, this facility is unique in Europe as it can produce not only the CDRs, but the requisite jewel cases, wrapping and inserts within three to five days of receiving an order.
Alex Pyott added: "The look of the new plant was important to us.
"As a flagship venture with significant investment, not only from CMC, but also from local and national government, we receive many visitors. "We paid attention to details like colours, so the compound resin anti static floor doesn't just perform a job of preventing dust and repelling spillages, it is also a rather lovely cornflower blue".
The CDRs are made from polycarbonate substrate, granules of which are melted and then extruded by the specialist injection moulding machines.
A metallic layer is added prior to printing.
The disk is put into its case, and then the accompanying insert is added and finally, the black tray joins them.
Next, the CDRs are sealed with a plastic wrapper.
Currently the Cramlington plant produces 120 CDRs per minute on 1.8 second cycles.
Very few other plants in the world are able to master, electroform and manufacture CDRs, as well as complete all the artwork, printing and packaging.
