Innovative HVAC Design for Archer Aviation's eVTOL Battery Abuse Chamber - San Jose, CA
Image Credit: Archer Aviation
Category: Laboratories
Overall Area: 295 sq ft
Services Provided: Hazardous Materials Management Plan; Lower Explosive, Permissible Exposure, Short Term Exposure Limit Concentration Calculations.
Completion Date: 2024
Owner: Archer Aviation
Contractor(s): Novo Construction, All Temperature Service
Project Description
Archer Aviation is pioneering the development of electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft for airline operators, aiming to revolutionize urban transportation with air taxi services in the near future, However, their vision hinges on completing critical experiments to address and mitigate potential battery failure risks. There was no off-the-shelf testing chamber available to them, so they built their own. The problems were that the custom chamber was not a listed product and the conventional method of adding a rooftop dust collection system was prohibitively expensive and had a lead time that was too long for the client.
Pragmatic Professional Engineers stepped up and analyzed the existing installation, third-party testing reports, the proposed HVAC system design, and the chamber itself to identify the potential hazards to humans and risks of fire. Adding high temperature filters at the chamber avoided the need for a rooftop dust collection system, which greatly favored the economics of the overall project.
In meetings with the Archer Aviation test technicians, constraints to the established testing protocol were changed to help mitigate high temperatures against the dust filter and duct system. Pragmatic PE also coordinated with the construction team to change the proposed HVAC design to limit toxic and explosive gas concentrations in the duct system or in the room.
Through meetings with the city, Pragmatic PE added audible and visual alarms to the room triggered by gas concentration sensors. In a written narrative describing how the system would operate under various failures to the power or mechanical systems, the fire department inspector approved the permit the custom chamber without requiring a conventional dust collection system.