The air and water permeabilities of a building are the important characteristics as they control the way the structure will perform throughout its life. Too little or too much can both cause rot and decay as well as affect the fabric of the building and the health of the people who live or work inside, particularly any with asthma or allergies.
Numerous regulations and standards govern the area and yet testing has been hard and longwinded. Versaperm equipment, available from Novasys Group , can overcome this and test the permeability of materials, components and entire structures, including walls, bricks, plaster, plastics, DPCs, coatings, felts, sarking board, mastics, laminates and a wide range of commonly used products.
Versaperm equipment is unusual as it can measure thick samples such as wall cross-sections. Using the standard flat sample chamber it can measure samples up to 50mm thick, which is sufficient for most items used by the building industry. However, Novasys Group also have a number of non-standard chamber configurations for measuring almost any thickness of building material. The Versaperm equipment also has specialist equipment for measuring the leakage rate of adhesives, mastics and other sealing products.
Novasys Group have developed their own permeability equipment, which can produce accurate and reliable results in the parts per million and sometimes in the parts per hundreds of million range. With some materials this can be achieved in as little as 30 minutes, but even with hard to measure foils, results can normally be turned around in a day. Versaperm equipment can be also configured to measure the permeability of many gases including Oxygen, Carbon Dioxide, water vapour and hydrocarbons. Additionally, the company offers a laboratory testing service for companies that test too few samples to make the purchase of equipment viable.