Laboratory ventilation is very different from commercial and industrial systems. As a result, many experienced HVAC engineers, designers, and contractors can go through their entire career without having to design a laboratory system. Laboratory personnel treat their ventilation systems as a given. They expect them to be designed right, to work perfectly all the time, and to require no real effort or understanding on their part. Most end users have only the most rudimentary understanding of how their own systems work, alarm, and can fail. Yet they implicitly rely on these systems to keep them safe. The convergence of these two factors often results in laboratory ventilation systems that are poorly designed, marginally functional, and not as safe as assumed.
For more information on this area you might want to consider the University of Wisconsin training course on Successful Laboratory Design: Grass Roots, Renovations, and Relocations. For more information please see epd.wisc.edu and search for the course title.
Richard P Palluzi LLC 