Patent Application
20050198726
The present invention relates generally to the field of safety apparel, and more specifically to a safety garment having reduced particulate shedding properties.
Safety garments, such as disposable smocks, jumpsuits, gloves, shoe coverings, and hair coverings, are required apparel for the performance of many jobs. Some of the jobs requiring safety garments are performed in clean room environments, wherein the introduction of foreign matter must be minimalized. For example, technicians in certain sensitive medical fields dealing with infectious matter, aerospace researchers assembling interplanetary probes, and material scientists developing and manufacturing ultrapure materials all wear safety garments in clean room environments. The safety garments perform the dual function of protecting the wearer from the potentially hazardous materials he is working with as well as preventing unwanted matter from the wearer's person from contaminating his work product.
Safety garments for use in clean room environments are typically made from nonwoven disposable materials, such as from sheets of spunbond/melt blown/melt blown/spunbond (SMMS) material and the like. Such sheets of material are cut into patterns and stitched together to form desired safety apparel. Typically, as these garments are intended to be disposable and the focus is on their functionality and not aesthetic appeal, little attention is paid to the hemming and stitching. The “as cut” edges are thus exposed. However, in clean room environments where contaminant levels in the parts per million or even parts per billion are too much, such exposed cut edges present genuine sources of potential particulate contamination.
Moreover, as these garments are intended to be disposable, little effort is made to provide durable stitching. The prevalent attitude is that a garment intended to be worn for just a few hours does not require superior stitching. However, in a clean room situation, seam separation is not only a potential source of particulate evolution in and of itself, but also produces a pathway from the interior to the exterior of the garment through which potentially hazardous material may flow.
There thus remains a need for a need for an improved safety garment that is more durable and less prone to particulate shedding. The present invention addresses this need.
The present invention relates to a disposable clean room safety garment, including at least one sheet of nonwoven fabric having at least one cut edge, a plurality of stitches formed in the sheet(s) of nonwoven fabric to define a garment; and hemming formed at cut edges. The nonwoven fabric is preferably formed from spunbond/meltblown material. The stitching is characterized by an optimized stitch density of between ten and twelve stitches per inch.
One object of the present invention is to provide and improved safety garment. Related objects and advantages of the present invention will be apparent from the following description.
For the purposes of promoting an understanding of the principles of the invention and presenting its currently understood best mode of operation, reference will now be made to the embodiments illustrated in the drawings and specific language will be used to describe the same. It will nevertheless be understood that no limitation of the scope of the invention is thereby intended, with such alterations and further modifications in the illustrated device and such further applications of the principles of the invention as illustrated therein being contemplated as would normally occur to one skilled in the art to which the invention relates.
In practice, the garments 10 are made by cutting one or more sheets of nonwoven material into a desired safety garment pattern. Simple patters (i.e., shoe coverings) may require a single sheet; more complex patterns (i.e., smocks, jumpsuits, and the like) may require tow or more sheets of varying size. The sheet(s) is/are then stitched together to defining a garment 10. The edges of the garment 10 are then hemmed. All cut edges are twice folded and hemmed under to prevent exposure of any cut edges that could increase the likelihood of particulate shedding. All stitching is characterized by an optimized stitch density in the range of 10 to 12 stitches per inch.
While the invention has been illustrated and described in detail in the drawings and foregoing description, the same is to be considered as illustrative and not restrictive in character. It is understood that the embodiments have been shown and described in the foregoing specification in satisfaction of the best mode and enablement requirements. It is understood that one of ordinary skill in the art could readily make a nigh-infinite number of insubstantial changes and modifications to the above-described embodiments and that it would be impractical to attempt to describe all such embodiment variations in the present specification. Accordingly, it is understood that all changes and modifications that come within the spirit of the invention are desired to be protected.
