Hazardous substances make their way through the human body not only by entering through the mouth or nose, they also penetrate the skin, the biggest and probably the most stressed organ of the body. In developping the skin, nature has equipped the human organism with a protecting, highly complex and extremely powerful system. The skin protects us from all sorts of chemical, physical and biological attacks on the the inner parts of the body. But especially in the developped and high-tech-industrial countries the skin is being stressed in a way that exceeds it´s powers. In order to protect oneself against chemical substances, it is common practice to wear protective clothing that shelters the body, the arms and the legs from dangerous influences. Permeation is the transport of single molecules through the protective clothing. The transport does not take place because of microscopic holes in the clothing (which would have to be called penetration) but because of the chemical and physical effects happening between the material of the protective clothing and the chemical. When exercising chemical tests of protective clothes, the determination of the time that different chemicals need to break through and to permeate is the most essential basis for the assessment of the risk potential. The European standard EN 374 regulates the implementation of chemical tests of protective gloves that analogously can be taken as a basis for the testing of protective clothes in general. EN 374 describes the determination of the resistance of the material of the protective glove to the permeation of a solid or liquid chemical by measuring the time the chemical needs to break through the material. The measurement is performed in a temperated Permeation-measuringcell in compliance with EN 374 and EN ISO 6530. In the measuring cell, the sample is clamped. After this step, the product chamber is filled with the test chemical and the collecting chamber is perfused with purified ambient air. A substream of gas is leaded to a suitable detector (for example PID) for concentration measurement. The recording of the detector signal provides the permeation curve of the investigated material chemicals pair and allows the determination of the permeationrate. The construction of the compact and mobile system was based on a development by IFA: „Aus der Arbeit des IFA, Nr. 0304“ (Download : www.dguv.de/ifa). The device was designed for testing the permeability for chemicals of chemical protective gloves and chemical protective clothing materials. Author: Werner Zillger LABC-Labortechnik, Hennef (www.LABC.de)
