Autoclave Charles Chamberland in 1884, although a precursor known as the steam digester was created by Denis Papin in 1679. The name comes from Greek "auto-", ultimately meaning self, and Latin "clavis" meaning key, thus a self-locking device. Sterilization autoclaves are widely used in microbiology, medicine, podiatry, tattooing, body piercing, veterinary medicine, mycology, funerary practice, dentistry, and prosthetics fabrication. They vary in size and function depending on the media to be sterilized and are sometimes called retort in the chemical and food industries. Typical loads include laboratory glassware, other equipment and waste, surgical instruments, and medical waste. A notable recent and
Ultrasonic cleaning medical applications, sterilization normally follows ultrasonic cleaning as a separate step. Industrial ultrasonic cleaners are used in the automotive, sporting, printing, marine, medical, pharmaceutical, electroplating, disk drive components, engineering and weapons industries. Ultrasonic cleaning is used to remove contamination from industrial process equipment such as pipes and heat exchangers. Ultrasonic cleaning is used widely to remove flux residue from soldered circuit boards. However, some electronic components, notably MEMS devices such as gyroscopes, accelerometers and microphones can become damaged or destroyed by the high intensity vibrations they are subjected to during cleaning. Piezoelectric buzzers can work in reverse and produce voltage,