Despite substantial effort taken by countries to reduce risk; explosions are still common events in mining and industry. Refuge shelters are built to provide isolated breathable air when air quality has been compromised. These chambers need to be maintained regularly because of their vital importance when accidents or explosions happen.
Refuge Shelters
Despite planning and safety precautions certain industries, such as mining, have a higher risk of exposing personnel to contaminated or unsafe air due to fire, explosions, or rock falls. A refuge chamber is a sealed and secured area, with shelter, designed for use in these emergency situations. They have a closed-circuit breathing apparatus to provide breathable clean air, with temperature and humidity control, to ensure the safety of personnel.
These refuge chambers must be routinely maintained to ensure positive pressure and prevent hazardous gases entering the chamber. Testing the airtightness of the pods for leak sites can be a vital addition to the maintenance of the chamber and works well to compliment the built in gas sensing apparatus. This not only ensures the critical infrastructure is fit-for-purpose in the event of an emergency, by preventing hazardous gas and particle ingress but it also ensure the quality of the breathable air being circulated.
As with most forms of engineering, it is usually the moving parts which wear out first, and the leak sites will tend to manifest themselves around the doors and windows, which are opened and closed. As such airtight integrity is often compromised at the entry points. Moreover, airtightness is NOT a constant. Consequently, doors must be checked for air leaks regularly to ensure the overall integrity of the refuge chamber, beyond standard testing.
These shelters are also subject to regulation by the International Standards Organisation and airtightness testing with the Portascanner® AIRTIGHT 520 will enable you to ensure continual compliance with ease.
The Portascanner® AIRTIGHT 520
The Portascanner® AIRTIGHT 520 is a powerful and unique handheld tool to ensure refuge shelters and chambers are sufficiently airtight to perform their intended purpose. The Portascanner® AIRTIGHT 520 allows maintenance operators to ensure the pods are sufficiently airtight by locating any leaks and quantifying the air permeability through them.
The unique ability to detect, locate and quantify air leaks, non-disruptively and without the need for any room pressurisation, in a complementary manner to existing Door Fan and Pulse Airtightness Testing. It enables users to make sharper decisions, verify technical specifications, and reveal possible defects if design standards have not been met rapidly and reliably.
The Portascanner® AIRTIGHT 520 takes Coltraco Ultrasonics’ understanding of fluid dynamics at sea and applies it to air flow dynamics on land. They take the best ultrasonic technology in Coltraco’s hardware to identify leak sites with a microscopic level of accuracy and apply computer science to measure and quantify the leak-site by the Portascanner® AIRTIGHT 520’s algorithm, which also generates a value for the air flow rate through that leak and the building’s overall air permeability.
The Portascanner® AIRTIGHT 520 consists of the ultrasound generator and ultrasound receiver. The handheld ultrasound generator produces ultrasonic signal that fills the enclosure and the handheld ultrasound receiver is able to locate and quantify the extent of any leaks through the escaped ultrasound signal through gaps in the seal. This principle can be used in a variety of industries and is used across our instrumentation, below is a diagram demonstrating the use of ultrasound in detecting damage in cable transit areas.

Testing for airtightness can now be completed faster, better and more efficiently, and therefore cheaper, with the Portascanner® AIRTIGHT 520. Leaks with a diameter as small as 0.5mm can now be detected, quickly located and quantified with the Portascanner® AIRTIGHT 520 to ensure Mining Refuge Chambers are airtight.