this question is regarding standards and/or best practice guidelines for ESD control in a professional lab environment.
We are currently tightening up our (admittedly too lax) ESD control in the labs, in preparation for an audit. We've had a chance to see the audit results from another one of our labs and are working on all the things they failed on.
One of the issues we have is how to manage non-ESD areas in a Lab. The lab itself is marked off as an ESD protected area, and has suitable flooring. The lab in question is our 'construction' lab, which has a few soldering benches and general tools/equipment. The majority of it will be ESD protected and grounded as appropriate, but there is going to be a mechanical rework bench in the corner which will not be ESD protected. The bench will be a metal frame, with a thick piece of ply on top so you can hammer/drill/bash/whatever.
Does anybody have an idea as to what best practice/standards would say about non-ESD working areas in an ESD room? Would it be sufficient to just mark out the area? It has the same dissipative floor tiles underneath, is that an issue? Would you ground the metal frame of the mech. workbench?
It terms of geography, the room is isolated from the rest of the office by walls, has ESD flooring throughout the room and ESD walkway to the other labs. In order to walk to the mech. working area, you would need to walk through the ESD protected area. It is likely that workers will swap between the mech. work bench and the ESD-safe soldering bench.
Any thoughts?
Best Answer
Just to complete the circle, we passed the audit and it was acceptable to have a non-esd area in an other ESD protected lab. The only requirements were that the area is suitably marked out (we have tape with arrows on which indicated which side was ESD protected), and that anything highly charged is a good distance from EPA work areas.
A side comment regarding ESD audits and protection is everybody has a different idea what is ESD good, and what is not, what is required and what is overkill. By sticking to a fixed, official standard (in our case IEC 61340), we avoided conflicts of so called common sense and had black and white standards to adhere to.
Also training is an on going thing which often organisations can improve, but the biggest issue we had is that ESD was not really considered except when directly handling sensitive products. We had to replace or refurb a lot of racking shelves, furniture, tools, workbenches etc because ESD was not considered when they were bought.