Safety first at the heating plant: Explosion-protected vacuum cleaners collect flammable liquids

Customer:	University Clinic of Düsseldorf
Extracted material:	Flammable liquids (heating oil, petrol)
Industry:	Other
Vacuum cleaner:	Ruwac BFSD-AV with compressed air drive

Düsseldorf University Hospital is an important medical centre, treating patients from the Düsseldorf area and far beyond. 29 clinics and 30 institutes provide treatment to over 50,000 people on an inpatient basis every year. An additional 300,000 people visit the hospital for outpatient care. The hospital employs a total of 5500 medical staff, among them 800 doctors. It operates many of its own facilities, such as a trade shop and training centres.

Problem

This infrastructure of the University Clinic includes a fossil-fuel combined heat and power plant to heat the hospital buildings. When filling the tanks or carrying out maintenance and repair work in the power plant, it is impossible to completely rule out the risk of spilling small amounts of flammable liquids like fuel oil or petrol. They need to be extracted and disposed of safely, immediately, and with no residue. Since the University Clinic highly values occupational safety and risk preparation, they wanted to purchase a liquid vacuum specially designed for this task.

Solution

The project managers chose a Ruwac type BFSD-AV vacuum cleaner, which can extract residues of flammable liquids in hazard classes A I, A II, A III and B easily and safely.

In addition to the normal explosion protection equipment offered on Ruwac vacuum cleaners, the BFSD-AV is also equipped with additional safety functions. An automatic fill level monitor ensures the vacuum cleaner turns off automatically when the collection container reaches the maximum fill quantity.

The compressed air drive of the vacuum cleaner (a version with electrical drive is also available) is not critical in terms of explosion protection aspects.

 By taking these precautions the University Hospital's technical services team can be sure that any leak of flammable liquids will be quickly and safely removed, at no risk to the operation of the combined heat and power plant.