Air quality control in control rooms [of paper mills]

Current paper mill-wide preventive maintenance programs may be lacking a critical, cost and labor-cutting component: the use of "environmental control" to prevent corrosion of electronic and electrical equipment. Field results indicate that from 30 to 40 percent of computer board failures are directly due to corrosion. This corrosion can be prevented by controlling the quality of the air in rooms where electronics are located. In this paper, environmental specifications are discussed by which the environmental conditions within the electronics rooms can be measured and compared to established ISA standards. Case studies have shown that controlling environmental conditions can substantially reduce unnecessary repair and maintenance costs associated with electronic's failure-and thus should be aggressively incorporated into every mill's preventive maintenance program.