Investigation of influential factors on laboratory fume hood containment performance

Abstract

The necessity of understanding the potential limitations of fume hood applications is widely neglected because the user tends to consider that the fume hood itself has been certified prior to installation. However, a wide variety of conditions in real laboratory environments may create serious negative impacts on the performance of fume hood containment, consequently increasing the personnel exposure to hazardous materials. The work reported in this article aimed to understand these negative impacts through a comprehensive numerical simulation together with a field experiment. The simulation provided the information of the airflow pattern and contaminant distribution inside the fume hood. The accuracy of the model was verified by an on-site experiment with an electron capture detector and off-site gas chromatography analysis. It is noteworthy that the tracer gas emission character yields a much stronger correlation with the containment failure of a fume hood, compared with the thermal challenge. Better understanding of the effect of those influential factors can contribute to some reference value in engineering control of hazardous material exposure in the laboratory environment. The methodology taken in this study can be referred to by occupational health officers and ventilation engineers to investigate other causes of low hood containment performance.