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Vent panels contain fire

By Design News Staff -- Design News, May 21, 2001

Belleville, Ontario —Marc Soubliere wants to protect his customer's investment. As a Nortel design engineer, he needs to be sure that if any fires were to originate from the company's rack-mounted equipment, adjacent equipment would not be burned. He's also concerned with EMI shielding.

Soubliere could have used many types of EMI shielding products, but he chose StreamShield, a shielding air vent panel with fire-retardant coating from Parker Hannifin's Chomerics Div. (Woburn, MA). "The characteristic that interests us is the flame control this panel offers," says Soubliere.

StreamShield has a thin layer of intumescent coating in the vent's honeycomb cells. When exposed to flames or heat above 300F, the coating expands rapidly, filling the cells with carbonaceous foam that prevents flames from propagating through the honeycomb.

"We conducted a number of worst-case qualifying tests where the performance of the fire retardant HEICF 1594 intumescent coating system offered an extremely impressive flame containment performance," says Soubliere. The HEICF 1594 coating helps enclosures meet the requirements of network equipment building systems and Bellcore GR-63-CORE physical protection standards for fire resistance.

StreamShield EMI vents provide more than 50 dB shielding effectiveness from 1 to 10 GHz. Open area of the honeycomb is 85% with the intumescent coating.

For more information about vent panels from Parker Hannifin Chomerics: Enter 534

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