Laminar airflow tunnels

Recent sterilizer developments have led to the use of dry-heat sterilizing tunnels where heat transfer is achieved by infra-red irradiation or by forced convection in filtered laminar airflow tunnels. Items to be sterilized are placed on a conveyer belt and pass through a high-temperature zone (250 - 300 + °C) over a period of several minutes. 

Figure 3 is a roughly to scale comparison of the two main types of sterilizing tunnel in industrial use, radiant-heat sterilizing tunnels and the more recently developed laminar airflow (LAF) tunnel sterilizers. 

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