Air quality is a widely used metric in a variety of portions of our lives. Its composition, particulates, and purity are all of concern for several applications – weather services regularly measure the air in a variety of ways to gather information about our atmospheric conditions and pollution levels; hospitals monitor the quality of the air in patient rooms and “clean rooms”; manufacturing floors for the semiconductor industry are stringently measured for air quality concerns. Even something as inconspicuous as the makeup of the air we breathe can have significant implications for these and other industries.
The measurement process is a complicated procedure, and the accuracy of the measurements is crucial for a successful and useful end result. One problem that often occurs is that, for a number of reasons, the sampling tubing used can cause buildups on the walls of the tubing of the very particulates that are being measured. This can cause some wildly inaccurate readings of air quality, as the ratio of particulate to the volume of air sampled is a critical factor in these readings.
At Vanguard, we have developed some special silicone materials that help in getting accurate readings when used as part of the sampling mechanism, such as in the sampling tubing. These silicone materials have special additives in them to combat the buildup of particulate on the sampling walls through phenomenon such as static buildup. Further, these compounds are made from materials that will not add chemicals or particulate to the airstream, leading to extraordinarily accurate readings.
While it’s easy to ignore the air around us, knowing its properties and being able to regulate them affords us some pretty amazing things – the manufacture of semiconductors in your smartphone, the accuracy of information on your local weather channel, and the preservation of many old or brittle artifacts in museums, to name a few. At Vanguard, we breathe easy knowing we provide one solution in the process for air quality measurement, and have a hand in its many expansive applications.