AIR TESTING!

These canisters are versatile and are used to sample for indoor air quality, environmental compliance, worker exposure, and other applications. A “whole air” sample is collected when the air is drawn into the canister. In the picture below, we draw a sample from air inside a vent pipe—the black pipe with white cap being the part of the vent. The canister comes from the lab under (almost) absolute vacuum. At first, the vacuum pump (on the right) purges the vent for a few minutes to ensure that the sample will be representative of the environment it gets drawn from; the valving blocks the canister during that priming operation. Then we change the valves so that the pump is blocked from the vent and blocked from the canister, and the canister opens toward the vent. The air sample now enters the empty canister.