Lab Risk Assessments (SMART Labs) Lunch & Learn

Join us for this lunch & learn with Otto Van Geet and Rachel Romero of NREL.

A Smart Lab’s Choose Your Own Adventure: Laboratory Ventilation Risk Assessment

Ventilation is a defense mechanism to mitigate airborne hazards produced during research activities in laboratories. Yet as a vital component to maintaining healthy, safe, indoor air quality, laboratory ventilation systems can fall victim to ineffective operation, posing a risk to researchers. This presentation outlines how laboratory professionals can employ a Smart Labs program. This includes completing a laboratory ventilation risk assessment—a systematic process for identifying risk from airborne hazards and informing dynamic demand-based ventilation to enhance laboratory safety and energy efficiency.

Structured as a choose-your-own-adventure presentation, audience members will be walked through how to conduct a laboratory ventilation risk assessment, such as learning how to perform a series of laboratory surveys and how to assign each laboratory characteristic with a risk control band. Audience members will also receive a demonstration on how to use the Laboratory Ventilation Risk Assessment Tool, available under the Smart Labs Toolkit. This tool guides users through the steps of a laboratory ventilation risk assessment and provides ASHRAE laboratory ventilation design levels to calculate recommended air change rates based on the laboratory’s overall risk assessment.