Cermax Clears Airways at Nottingham City Hospital

A Cermax portable hygrometer from Michell Instruments is enabling moisture content in medical gas pipelines throughout Nottingham City Hospital to be measured more easily and with greater accuracy than previous methods. The portability and ease-of-use provided by the Cermax system mean that precise on-site readings - accurate to within ±1ºC dewpoint - can be made at different locations, allowing important decisions to be made on the spot according to the results.

It is essential to check the moisture content of compressed air and gases used in medical applications, in order to avoid promoting humid conditions that stimulate potentially harmful bacterial growth and also to avoid condensation interfering with or corroding critical equipment. At Nottingham City Hospital, Cermax is used primarily to test medical air lines where moisture may be carried over from air compressors; the system is, however, also used for quality control following work on pipelines, to check that stored pipework has not become contaminated with moisture during storage, as well as to respond to specific queries. Weighing only 3kg, and offering IP66 protection, Cermax is lightweight and robust enough to take humidity measurements wherever they are needed in the hospital.

Since its purchase, the hospital has been using Cermax in place of its previous method using water vapour detector tubes for moisture measurement in the main. According to Rob Parkinson, District Quality Controller for the Nottingham City Hospital NHS Trust, Cermax provides a "useful addition to the techniques available to us. Its main advantage is that it's much easier to connect to various systems and to exclude any ambient moisture. With sampling tubes, this can prove much more difficult.

We have also appreciated its ease-of-use: you can connect Cermax to each system, let it stabilise, then get a more precise and easy-to-read reading than you would have got with detection tubes."

In addition to these benefits, Cermax also allows operators in the hospital to select a range of hygrometric units that are displayed on-screen; these units include dewpoint, ppm(W), ppm(V), gm-3 and percentage relative humidity. Although most of the hospital's measurements are made in dewpoint, this facility allows instant results on occasions where measurements have to be converted to conform to industrial standard limits.

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