Portascanner AIRTIGHT

The Portascanner® AIRTIGHT is a powerful and unique handheld tool to aid in ensuring a room, compartment or building is sufficiently airtight. It uses ultrasound to detect, identify and locate air leakage sites. On top of this, the Portascanner® AIRTIGHT is the first system of its type that can take this on step further and measure the physical extent of each individual leak site.

Airtightness is crucial for both the built environment and the fire sector; in the built environment, airtightness has environmental, cost saving and occupant health benefits, by facilitating effective and efficient ventilation, filtration and heating of the building. In the fire sector, airtightness is imperative to ensure that, in the event of a fire, a room or compartment will contain a fire extinguishing agent for a sufficient time to completely extinguish the fire. To ensure that airtightness standards are met, a room integrity test, such as a door fan test, must be carried out. These tests, however, have some limitations:

• They only provide limited information about the room or compartment, providing only the overall leakage rate and offering no information on where these leaks are occurring or their extent.
• They are highly disruptive, typically requiring the removal of a door to be replaced with a fan to pressurise the room and the complete evacuation of the room.
• They are typically quite costly, and it is not uncommon for a room or compartment to fail a first test.

With the Portascanner® AIRTIGHT, not only can you precisely and reliably pinpoint the exact location of any leak sites (far more accurately than with the naked eye, as is often done currently), but you can also measure each leak individually and identify exactly where to focus your repairs. The test can be conducted in a matter of minutes, with minimal disruption to the normal operation of the room and absolutely no requirement to vacate the room.

Using the 8-megapixel camera on the rear of the device, users can take a photograph of the area they are testing and mark the location of any leaks identified with just a tap of a finger. Users can conduct either a “Quick Test”, simply scanning a structure for leaks and marking them on an image for future reference, or a “Full Test”. For a full test, after identifying and locating all the leak sites in the structure, careful measurements of the strength of the signal are used to calculate the cross-sectional area of each leak site, with algorithms independently verified by the National Physical Laboratory.

The calculated leak areas are then used to predict the air flow rate through each leak and, in turn, the total leakage rate for the room in either air permeability or air changes per hour. All of this data can then be exported to the provided USB stick, either in a CSV file, for integration with your existing systems, or in an automatically generated report. These reports can be filtered by date, site, room and structure and include a break down of each room and structure individually.