Why modular cleanrooms are the future

Modular cleanrooms offer an innovative alternative to conventional cleanrooms for spaces that require a certain flexibility in terms of future needs or restricted build timeline. Modularity is the starting point to help companies to enable cleanroom technology in life sciences, with ‘modular’ meaning scalable, flexible, agile and most importantly: enabling speed. They have the flexibility to upgrade the cleanliness level of the production area or to expand the area in the future.

The current cleanroom market is one where companies in need of a rather small dimensional cleanroom area are located as incubation in universities or science parks, often university spin-offs, with designs that don’t allow easy relocation, expansion or separation. Let’s present such companies a modular and mobile cleanroom unit.

The development of SteriCube for example fits perfectly in this vision of pre-engineered and modular thinking. Due to its temporary character and scalability possibilities, modular cleanrooms appear to be a fast growing market. How is that? Some companies are only temporarily in need of a small cleanroom, others however prefer to start with a limited cleanroom area but with the possibility to expand later on. For these companies, a modular and scalable cleanroom seems to be the ideal solution and costs are oftentimes much lower than fixed units.

High quality as a result of pre-engineered design

Not only the initial investment or operational cost, but the quality as well will profit from modular cleanroom concepts. Whereas a low price and low quality are perceived as being in correlation with each other, we want to focus on the modular cleanroom’s paradigm shift. SteriCube delivers a modular solution with higher quality for a much lower cost.

When we take the quality of modular cleanrooms into consideration, we are convinced that the delivered quality can be much higher than the quality of a cleanroom built from scratch on site. Modular cleanroom concepts are characterized by ‘pre-thinking’, which arises from our vision of ‘Pre-engineered cleanroom concepts’. This in contrary to an on-site work space with other subcontractors being around who might have no business at all with the cleanroom construction, affecting its quality.

Circular thinking

As companies are moving from the linear “take, make, dispose” model towards the circular model, pre-engineered concepts are becoming a key factor for success. ‘Pre-engineered’ means re-using knowledge, data and materials (so called tangible and intangible ‘building blocks’ to enable modular thinking). The modular SteriCube concept facilitates a circular “use it when you need it” thinking, releasing enormous opportunities for Business Model Innovation.

Due to constant connectivity with the cleanroom, it becomes possible to gather data about the efficiency and use of the cleanroom, and to act immediately when something occurs. We can therefore point out the life cycle of the asset, but more importantly, change over to a higher life cycle optimization. Later on, the asset can be ‘upcycled’ to other projects. So, no doubt that modularity and scalability are of the utmost importance to create customer value in the field of cleanroom technology.