Pacific Rubber & Packing Joins the Open Compute Project to Help Advance Liquid Cooling Cleanliness Standards

The maker of VeriClean Seals™ brings seal-contamination data to the OCP Community and asks a question: how clean should a wetted seal be in D2C liquid cooling?

SAN CARLOS, CA, UNITED STATES, October 9, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Pacific Rubber & Packing, Inc. (PRP), a precision sealing supplier to the semiconductor industry since 1979 and maker of VeriClean Seals™, today announced it has joined the Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP) as a Bronze member. PRP will work within OCP’s Cooling Community to help establish an incoming particulate cleanliness standard for elastomeric seals used in liquid-cooled AI infrastructure.

Every direct-to-chip cooling loop depends on hundreds of seals, gaskets and O-rings. Each one is qualified for coolant compatibility, inspected for gross defects and protected by a filter rating. None of those checks looks at what is sitting on the seal’s surface. Today, no published standard defines how clean a wetted seal should be before it enters a loop that runs coolant within millimeters of the most expensive silicon in the building.

PRP has already published the data. Micah Silverman, PRP’s Lead R&D Engineer, has results from studies that show:
– Three distinct classes of surface contamination: insoluble particulate such as dirt, dust and carbon black; oils and release films from manufacturing and handling; and living bioburden.
– Variability across lots, bags and manufacturers wide enough that choosing a material or screening a supplier does not control it. Within a single bag, the cleanest and dirtiest seal can differ by orders of magnitude.
– A meaningful share of seal-borne particulate falls below typical loop filter ratings, small enough to pass through and contribute to microchannel fouling. A mechanism PRP calls cyclic contamination displacement: because a seal is designed not to fill its gland, every pressurization cycle shifts it and exposes surface area the initial flush never reached. Contamination keeps entering the loop long after commissioning.

“The semiconductor industry learned a long time ago that cleanliness has to be specified, measured and certified, or it isn’t controlled,” said Bill Sharratt, president of Pacific Rubber & Packing. “Liquid cooling hasn’t had that conversation about seals yet, and OCP is where it belongs. We’re joining to contribute what we’ve measured to the Community’s knowledge base for building reliable liquid-cooled infrastructure, so the engineers who design these loops have real data when they decide what “clean” should mean.”

PRP’s VeriClean Seals™ are processed in an ISO Class 7 cleanroom using a patent-pending particulate-reduction process that removes up to 95% of surface particulate contaminants before a seal enters a cooling loop. Each order ships with documented cleanliness verification.

More information, including PRP’s published cleanliness thresholds and the whitepaper “The Hidden Costs of Contamination in Liquid-Cooled Systems,” is available at www.vericlean.one.

About Pacific Rubber & Packing, Inc.
Founded in 1979 and headquartered in San Carlos, California, Pacific Rubber & Packing, Inc. engineers and supplies precision elastomer seals, O-rings, and gaskets for the semiconductor, data center, medical device, biopharma, aerospace, and energy industries. PRP operates a ISO Class 7 cleanrooms with in-house precision cleaning and certified cleanliness processing, and its VeriClean Seals™ particulate-reduction line serves applications where surface cleanliness is mission-critical. Learn more at pacificrubber.com or vericlean.one for data center-specific content.

Michelle Murray-Smith
PRP
+1 650-595-5888
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Liquid Cooling Loops Have a Seal Contamination Problem

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