Between a hard place and a rock........ It is hard to argue that EMC chambers should not have fire protection. The newer tiled facilities may have little combustible content other than the DUT. However, most factory insurance carriers will insist on an adequate prevention and extinguishing system. However........
If a water system is used, and goes off due to a fire OR a perceived fire, the water tends to ruin the typical cones. Result, big expense! Our oldest chamber has a halogen system, with a staged set of alarms. The alarms provide the opportunity to reset if someone merely plugged a 120V device into the 230V mains and produced some smoke, or any other false alarm. The halogen, if deployed, does no damage to the facility. Now the tricky part. Halogen has a bad rap due to the shrinking ozone layer and all. It may be difficult? to install halogen on new systems. The bad news is that such systems require a fair amount of stored halogen. The good news is that under proper installation, staged alarms, and good use of the chamber, the system should NEVER have to dump the halogen. If a real fire occurs, the halogen is the most efficient extinguisher, and can save a good deal of $$. But then there is that ozone layer............. Of course, regardless of the gas or fluid used in such systems, the sensors, piping, and nozzles must generally be as non-conductive as possible to preserve the needed chamber EMC characteristics. George Alspaugh Lexmark International Inc. --------- This message is coming from the emc-pstc discussion list. To cancel your subscription, send mail to [email protected] with the single line: "unsubscribe emc-pstc" (without the quotes). For help, send mail to [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], or [email protected] (the list administrators).
