Bäckman, Lennart

Safety Equipment Australia Pty. Ltd.
Private Bag 1001
Warriewood, NSW 2103
Australia

Respirators have for many years been designed to meet various standards.  These standards are said to be minimum performance standards, and there is an expectation that they meet the real demands of the user. Our long experience with breathing protection had made us think that this may not be the case.

When designing our new respirator, we decided to look at the actual user demands, not just the requirements of the standards.  We started with a literature search.  This search revealed many works that approached the problem from different angles, and included one very comprehensive work from the 1940's by Leslie Silverman.

We had mixed feelings about our discoveries.  They confirmed, on the one hand, what we had suspected: that there was in fact a large difference between what the standards specified and what the user required.  But on the other hand, how could there be so many standards, and products, in existence that fell so far short of what the user actually needed?

We decided to do some testing ourselves.  We wanted to confirm the results we had found in the literature, and also to check a couple of things we could find no information about, like the effects of speech and body movements on breathing patterns.

This is a comparison of our test results with data from the literature.