AmVentco Pressure Vents | Research and Development

The only supplier of Pressure Vents with tested dynamic co-efficients!

By Chris Coxon, President, AmVentco, Inc.

I am a strong believer in the robust testing and development of products. I believe that in order to fully trust a company and the products it sells, that the products need to be tested within an environment that can match exactly, or as near exactly, the circumstances under which the products will be used. In fact, our motto is, “If we don’t know the answer we will build a test rig to find out!”

For pressure vents that have been designed for use with gas suppression systems, this means testing them with live gas suppression discharges. A static fan test, which might be fine for HVA constant flow testing, is NOT a reliable way of ensuring a pressure vent performs as intended during a discharge.

For pressure vents protecting a building from the sub 500ms discharges from gas and air cooled switchgear this means developing a test facility that can reproduce such violent and instant pressure discharges in order to correctly map the performance of the vent in 10ms intervals.

This is why I built a blast simulator with AFP Air Tech Ltd, that houses a full gas suppression system and bespoke six inch air cannon capable of simulating the discharge from a gas insulated switchgear unit rupture disk.

AFP/BRE Live Discharge Tests of 2008

For a number of years I have been championing the need for pressure vents to be third party tested to prove that they carry out the task they are designed to do. Following discussions with LPCB, BRE in the UK and VDS regarding approvals for vents, I ascertained that there were no international standards in place to test pressure vents, so I decided in association with AFP and LPG to develop a testing format. This testing format consisted of two parts:

PART 1 – testing with Retrotec Integrity Test Fan Kit in a live test enclosure. This was to set parameters on being able to verify that an installed pressure vent can open at the designed pressure and can be fully opened without manual intervention.

PART 2 – live IG55 and FM200 discharge tests. These were carried out to test and verify that the pressure vents provided the correct free vent area (FVA) and to determine the back pressure created by the pressure vent. This was to determine not only that the units tested provided the FVA claimed but that they vented the risk and kept the risk pressure within the limits set by the VDS software calculation programme.

AmVentco ensures that all their products are certified by this means of testing. Test results can be viewed below.

Live Gas Discharge Test Results
A VDS Software Calculations package provided us with a free vent area for the risk at a pressure rating of 500 Pascal’s™ of 0.083m2. A full discharge of the gas with a 300mm x 300mm square hole providing 0.09 m2 of Free Vent Area (FVA). This equalled the exact full and unobstructed opening area of all the pressure vents tested.

Test – SHX300 Balanced Weight Pressure Vent
The AmVentco SHX UN 14 Pressure Vent (SHX-UN300 ) was installed and linked up to the recording device so that the vent blade positions could be accurately monitored and a discharge test carried out.
This verified that the pressure vent fully opened and that the peck pressure in the enclosure reached 251.8 Pascale’s™.

Please view the full test report on the certification page for a detailed view of both the SHX live discharge performance and our test protocol.