Combustible Dust Testing and Explosives Lab - Fike Testing Capabilities

Improved industrial safety can start with something as small as a speck of dust-quite literally, in fact. Fike’s proprietary Combustion Test Lab offers comprehensive explosibility dust testing, providing invaluable data that ultimately helps protect lives and assets. Contact our team today to receive your dust test results in as few as two weeks.
Transcript, in order of appearance: Adam Morrison, Mary Mayabb
My name is Adam Morrison. I’m the supervisor of Fike’s Combustion Test Laboratory.
The role of the combustion lab is to provide explosive characteristics for a customer’s material to the customer so they can put it proper protection equipment.
Before a customer can go in and put any protection equipment in their process, they have to know the combustible characteristics. So we are really the first cog in the entire explosion protection system.
The most common tests that we do is an explosibility test. We determine what’s the maximum pressure that’s achieved during the explosion and the rate of pressure rise-how quickly it got to that maximum pressure.
Once we are finished testing, we provide a test report to the customer explaining what those explosive characteristics we determined were. From that, the customer will use those numbers in calculations for different protection equipment, whether it be for vents, isolation or otherwise, those numbers are used in the calculation to find out what exactly they need to fit their particular material.
The biggest thing that sets our combustion lab apart from anyone else’s is the fact that we’ve had the one-cubic-meter chamber for going on 30 years now. We’ve had a lot of experience working with that, and up until not long ago it was the only one located in the western hemisphere. There are a couple others now, but we have a great deal of experience working with it and a great deal of data that’s been provided from it. And many of the standards out there have references to Fike’s one-cubic-meter chamber.
My role is to work with the customers directly. So I’ll talk to them about what they are trying to accomplish and guide them through some of our testing. And then work with them through the various stages while we get the testing, get the samples sent in, and get it performed and present the data back to them.
We get customers calling us and saying “OSHA told me I need to have my dust tested because I may have combustible dust.” And then they go on to say, “I’ve been in business for 50 years and I’ve never had a problem at all.”
We are able to show them pretty point blank that your dust is explosive and you need to take measures. Maybe it’s going to save some lives down the road. That’s what we are hoping for.