Quality control for Meltblown TNTs at BARITECH OPERATIONS
In cooperation with the Department of Chemical, Material, and Industrial Production Engineering of the University of Naples Federico II, BARITECH OPERATIONS has developed an internal system for quality control of its meltblown production lines, which assures the production of TNT materials with permeability and filtration capacities compliant with UNI EN 14683:2019 standards.
In 2020, to help Italy facing the SARS-COV2 pandemic, the BARITECH OPERATIONS factory started the production of high quality meltblown TNT products for surgical mask production with a productivity of about 280.000 m2 per day.
To guarantee the product quality standards, the BARITECH OPERATION team built up experimental lab scale facilities and methodologies to test particle filtration, permeability, thickness, and weight of meltblown TNT products.
The experimental setup and methodologies for particle filtration analysis has been fine-tuned in cooperation with experts in aerosol technologies of the University of Naples Federico II, which have reached extensive experience in the characterization of face masks. The University team made possible to calibrate the experimental methods with state-of-the-art equipment for aerosol and bioaerosol analyses, and to develop robust physical-mathematical models to correlate particle filtration and permeability of the TNT with the Bacterial Filtration Efficiency, BFE. This latter proved the most critical parameter to produce surgical masks, whose utilization has been extended to Italian population as a countermeasure to the SARS-COV2 pandemic.
The experimental and model correlations have been verified through an extensive experimental campaign and validated against the results achieved by external certified labs. The study also helps tune and optimize the process operational parameters to achieve steady high-quality production standards. The same approach can be successfully adopted to predict the performances of BARITECH OPERATIONS meltblown TNT products in filtering fine and ultrafine particles for individual protection face masks, as those prescribed by the ISO 149/2009 standard.
Coupling the accurate online process control and the application of the new testing methodologies, through an intensive hourly check routine, BARITECH OPERATIONS is now able to guarantee the quality of its products in an easy, reliable, robust and consistent way.