Clean-Air completes duct-sealing project with Aeroseal

Clean-Air Aust has completed a project to seal leaks in the air conditioning ductwork at a Queensland Health Hospital.

The hospital system consisted of four AHUs supplying air (11,700L/s) to ground and first floor areas including oral health, cancer care, procedure rooms, administration and critical storage. The goal of the project was to avoid a conventional solution of removing all ductwork and replacing with new, which would have turned the area into a construction site.

“Our aim was to circumvent any disruption to critical services being provided to patients by using Aeroseal technology to seal the ductwork from the inside,” says Project Manager Muni Kumar, “with a target to achieve a 40 per cent reduction of air loss in the system.”

Before that work could start, however, Aeroseal needed Australian-recognised fire safety certification in order to be used within Queensland Health Hospitals. Clean-Air duly carried out testing of the product and passed certification for smoke generation in accordance with AS/NZS 1530.3:1999.

The project took less than three weeks to complete. Work was carried out overnight, with larger sections of ductwork carried out during the weekend, allowing units to run during the daytime and avoiding any downtime for the facility. Kumar says that Aeroseal sealant allowed them to only seal the portions where the duct was leaking, for example, the joins between sections where the gaskets had failed. This avoided a teardown off the whole HVAC system.

According to the project team, before using Aeroseal, leakage rates were 4091L/s. Afterwards they were just 263L/s, meaning that overall duct leakage had been reduced by 90 per cent. They say that the facility can now run its HVAC system at a fraction of the power that was previously needed, saving substantially on its energy costs.