Five Ways a Multi-Purpose Clean Air Booth Benefits Military Maintenance Repair and Operations
Military maintenance and repair operations (MRO) often require processes that can expose service members to airborne hazards. From coating propeller blades to prevent corrosion to sanding and painting MRAPs for redeployment, these processes release extremely toxic chemicals into the air, most notably hexavalent chromium, isocyanates and VOCs.
Not only can these chemicals make your service members ill, they can also interfere with the quality of the final build, potentially resulting in a mission-critical failure. Until recently, permanent clean rooms and paint booths were the only option to keep military service members safe during MRO. But permanent clean rooms and paint booths are difficult and time consuming to build, and may be impossible to install on deadline in military bases, hangars, and other forward operating bases.
Duroair engineers customized clean air booths, equipped with DuroPure™ industrial air filtration together with a flexible DuroRoom™ retractable enclosure. These multi-purpose booths can provide the same safety benefits of a permanent clean room, while saving time and expense.
Here are five ways that a Duroair multi-purpose booth can help you more cost-effectively optimize MRO, while protecting your service members during essential maintenance and repair tasks.
1. Reduce Military MRO Delays for Material Handling
Military maintenance and repair operations, such as aircraft and aviation MRO, may require moving colossal machines and parts. Many of these workpieces are large enough to shut down an entire hangar or facility when in transit to a permanent clean room. Relocating a large workpiece like a cargo plane engine into a clean room requires extensive material handling time and resources.
With a portable multi-purpose booth, you bring the clean air to the part or equipment rather than the other way around. Not only does this reduce material handling time, it also increases work safety and reduces labor needs, since portable clean air booths are easier to move than massive pieces of equipment.
2. Perform Simultaneous Multiple Maintenance & Repairs
Portable clean air booths are superior to permanent rooms because they allow your team to conduct multiple work activities at once. Instead of having to sand, then paint, then coat, your team can potentially be completing all three stages at once on three different parts — utilizing Duroair portable booths. These booths also come equipped with filtration systems that make it easy to simply change out the DuroPure filters in each booth for each maintenance task.
To allow work to proceed at a faster pace and prevent MRO bottlenecks, Duroair’s clean air booths can be customized for up to three chambers, to suit whatever work you need done at that moment in time. With this flexible clean air system, your team isn’t limited to a fixed clean room layout.
3. Reduce the Time for Maintenance and Repair Setup
Permanent clean rooms and paint booths take time to design and install, and time is a luxury that military MRO teams do not have. Furthermore, installing a permanent system may simply not be an option in forward operating bases where the situation is constantly in flux.
Duroair systems are ready to deploy at a moment’s notice, allowing service members to get started right away on MRO tasks. When not in use, the booths can retract to 20% of their extended length for easy storage. This also maximizes your hangar or facility space for mission readiness.
This flexibility means that your maintenance and repairs can be completed on time and that your enlisted personnel will have the reliable equipment they need to carry out their directives.
4. Ensure Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) Compliance
There’s a common misconception that portable clean air booths cannot provide the same level of air filtration as a hard-walled room. Fortunately, DuroPure filtration has undergone third-party testing to verify contaminant levels fall far below OSHA allowable standards and accommodate MERV 15, HEPA or NESHAP 319 standards by capturing particulates to .03 microns.
This patented, six-stage filtration captures 100% of airborne particulates, gasses and vapors. Meanwhile, the DuroRoom enclosure interlocks a fan, spray air and a VOC monitor all together, ensuring filtered air is recirculated within the enclosure. This eliminates the needs for venting, ducting and makeup air. Learn more about how our air filters and portable enclosures work together in our six-stage filtration guide.
5. Increase Military MRO Safety & Equipment Reliability
The most obvious benefit to a Duroair multi-purpose clean air booth is that it protects service members from the toxic chemicals involved in military maintenance and repair operations, such as aircraft and aviation MRO. Most importantly, these clean air systems improve MRO outcomes, such as anti-corrosion coating. In turn, military service members do not have to worry about equipment failure in the field, such as an aircraft propeller or cargo plane engine.
Multi-purpose booths ensure that painting and coating applications dry properly by stopping dust and other air particulates from interfering with the curing process. If these coatings do not cure completely, corrosion can result in equipment failure. Equipment failure not only endangers the mission, it endangers the lives of enlisted men and women. Duroair clean air systems are a crucial part of corrosion prevention and ensuring that military equipment remains safe to operate.
Duroair has a long history of supporting safe, efficient MRO at bases in Germany, Japan and across the U.S. We’ve also designed and installed over 250 systems at commercial manufacturers, aerospace and spaceflight operations.
Want to learn more about how Duroair multi-purpose booths can benefit your military maintenance, repair and operations? Contact our industrial clean air experts today for a free consultation.
