It must be clean

View of the new cleaning laboratory at the Colandis location in Kahla, which allows the company's service offerings to be expanded. (Photo: Angelika Schimmel/Oliver Will)

Colandis Managing Director Joachim Ludwig (Photo: Angelika Schimmel/Oliver Will)

Less is sometimes more. In any case, in the field in which Colandis GmbH from Kahla operates. The less you see here, the better it is. But actually, you see nothing with the naked eye either. After all, this is about air. About clean air. Colandis GmbH masters exactly this intangible, invisible medium.

That there are still huge differences between clean and pure air, the young boys and girls of the technical working group from Kahla's secondary school now learned firsthand from recognized experts in pure air, that is, almost nothing. The students were guests of the company during the open house this week, just like two dozen specialists from regional companies and beyond.

From Joachim Ludwig, founder and managing director of the Clean Company, and his employees, visitors learned how the Kahlaer manage to create an environment of the highest air purity class in their cleanrooms or cleanroom workstations and modules. For air purity class ISO 5, only 3.5 particles of just 0.5 micrometers in size may be detected in one liter. And that is far from the top; it can be even cleaner.

The 26 Kahlaer employees guarantee with their products that everywhere extremely clean air is needed for manufacturing or inspection processes, even the smallest dust particles do not become the dreaded grain of sand in the gear.

That such a pure room does not always have to be the size of a room, but can quite easily be as small as a vegetable crate, was demonstrated to the guests in the company's new showroom. "For the requirements of our customers, we create individual solutions like the module for a robot in wafer manufacturing, where cleanliness moves with the robot arm from machine to machine," explained Joachim Ludwig. To ensure that sensitive components are not contaminated with dust particles from the environment during this transport, a sophisticated fan-filter module is used.

Equipping an entire workshop hall as a cleanroom is often unnecessary for many processes — and generally energetically inefficient, explained Ina Henze-Ludwig to the interested listeners. Therefore, even in cleanroom technology today, it is more about individual solutions, such as for single workstations, shielded production areas, or mobile transport boxes. "We always emphasize to our customers that it is not only a sensitive process or work step that must be considered, but also adjacent areas," says Joachim Ludwig.

With an investment of around 35,000 euros, the Kahla company has now also set up a new cleaning laboratory. In it, workpieces, components, or entire machines, whose surfaces must be clean, or which need to be cleaned for use in a sensitive process, can be treated.

The students of the technical working group also learned during the company visit that young people in Kahla have plenty of career opportunities in the development and production of high-tech cleanroom products. Four young people have just started their training as manufacturing mechanics and office communication clerks at the company, but new employees will also be needed in the future, assured Ina Henze-Ludwig, who now runs the company together with her father.