By Rich Hill

Are you experiencing unexplained hard or soft failures?  Is your computer room between 10 and 20 years old?  Do you have a raised floor?  Do you have wood-core floor panels?  If you answered "YES" to some of the above, you may have zinc whiskers.

Zinc whiskers are a condition that can occur on some wood-core computer room flooring panels. The whiskers grow on the underside of the floor panels.  The whiskers are typically 2 microns in diameter and over time, the whiskers can grow to be several millimeters in length. When the whiskers break free, they become airborne and can circulate freely throughout the facility and get blown into your equipment.

If a whisker comes to rest on an exposed circuit card inside your equipment, it could cause a short; most likely an intermittent short. While several victims of zinc whiskers have experienced complete failures, you may only suspect you have zinc whiskers when your equipment posts fault conditions or other abnormalities.  You may also experience problems with your tapes and drives. 

If you’ve got wood-core flooring panels and the metal on the bottom has electroplated zinc, you need to check for whiskers.  The simplest and most straightforward method of detection is good old visual inspection. Rest the tile on its edge and sight down the plane of the tile and view the bottom surface with a flashlight.  Whiskers will appear as small shiny or glittering protrusions from the metal.  Remember, whiskers are typically only a few millimeters in length.  You should review several panels to get a good perspective of your situation.

If you determine you have a zinc whisker problem, the big question is what to do about them.  In the short term you can and should do nothing!  Literally nothing.  If the whiskers are undisturbed, they will generally remain attached to the panels.  However, this means that you can’t move the panels to facilitate equipment moves and rearrangements or even repairs.  In the long term, you don’t have any option other than to replace the affected floor panels.

Zinc whisker remediation is a high risk venture and should only be undertaken after careful planning.  Without proper equipment, personnel and procedures, the likelihood of success is low.  You must give consideration to how and when to replace panels under live equipment.  Also, you must perform a complete and very thorough cleaning of EVERY surface within the computer room in conjunction with the panel replacement.  It doesn't do any good to remove the source of the contamination without removing the loose whiskers left behind.

In conclusion, zinc whiskers are real, but manageable.  Many companies have successfully dealt with the problem and no doubt many more will be forced to deal with it in the coming years.  Be proactive!  Even if you haven’t had problems, check your panels.  If you think there may be zinc whiskers in your future, get some money in your budget to replace the floor before you have a problem.

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About the Author
Rich Hill is President of Data Clean Corporation.  The company has been cleaning computer rooms and other controlled environments since 1979.  Data Clean provides consulting and remediation services for zinc whiskers and other contamination problems.  Rich may be reached at rhill@dataclean.com.