Biological safety cabinets - by special order
About 20 years ago a young entrepreneur appeared at our offices asking us to set up a biochemistry lab. The lab was to provide chemistry labs, biology labs combining chemical safety hoods and biological safety cabinets. One biology lab would have a special biological safety cabinet that he thought should be purchased abroad.
After several months, the entrepreneur wanted to consult us on the subject of this special biological safety cabinet that he wanted to purchase abroad. The entrepreneur presented his expectations from this biological safety cabinet and claimed that he was at the final stages before ordering it from a leading European company that specializes in the construction of special order biological safety cabinets. He told us he had received another offer from an American manufacturer and that apart from these two companies, there was no other company in the world capable of contending with setting up a similar biological safety cabinet.
The entrepreneur wanted to consult us for purposes of selecting the right company and we recommended one of them. He claimed that the delivery date for this biological safety cabinet from that company would be 8 months without assembling it in Israel, without installing an injection robot within it and without carrying out the validation operations.
Owing to the problematic nature of dealing with the first company, we recommended the second company, but the entrepreneur claimed that the delivery date for supplying the biological safety cabinet through a special order with the second company would be more than a year. We suggested that he manufactured it in Israel, but he claimed that it was impossible to design such a biological safety cabinet and manufacture it within two months. We responded: Rotem Technologies Engineering Ltd. can produce this tailor-made safety cabinet under the DAF brand that we have been manufacturing for dozens of years.
Within less than two months, this client’s brand new biological safety cabinet was standing in the biology lab with a length of 320 cm, a depth of work surface of 150 cm, and a working chamber height of 150 cm net. A robot was assembled above the biological safety cabinet’s work surface that could handle 24,000 injections a day which weighed over 250 kg. Its fast motion and its movement along the X and Y axes added moment to its weight.
The biological safety cabinet and work surfaces were manufactured using perforated stainless steel trays that could be dismantled. Beneath the work surfaces, a chamber was incorporated for bringing in fresh air to the biological safety cabinet’s work chamber with the return air sent from the HEPA filter located in the upper portion of the biological safety cabinet as the surface plate of relatively thin metal could not handle the weight and moment of this robot.
For purposes of reinforcing the surface and stabilizing it, about 200 telescopic legs were installed that reinforced the surface without interfering with the large capacity noiseless air flow.
While designing the biological safety cabinet, which in our opinion is the largest produced in Israel, it was known as the “monster”, a nickname that accompanied it throughout the design, production and validation stages.
