Ambulance Oxygen System Pressure Monitoring

• Maintaining a sufficient supply of medical oxygen on ambulances is critical and pressure transducers can be used to constantly monitoring oxygen system pressure to ensure there’s enough supply for patients.
• Due to the high oxygen nature of these systems, instrumentation must have “Oxygen Clean” certifications to ensure ignitable dust is not present.
• To help ensure safety in oxygen system pressure monitoring, the CS10 Industrial Pressure Transducer, from Core Sensors, can arrive Oxygen Clean directly from the manufacturing facility.

Oxygen is a critical piece of equipment on an ambulance. It is vital that the oxygen tanks on the ambulance never drop too low or worse, completely run out. Pressure sensors are the most common instruments to monitor oxygen system pressure. A high quality pressure sensor is necessary to safely and continuously monitor the pressure supply in the oxygen tank. It can transmit a linear output signal to the ambulances control system. However, there are precautions that must be taken to ensure safe operation. Therefore, oxygen system pressure monitoring is critical.

Instruments with installation in oxygen-rich environments must be free of contaminants. For example, common contaminants include hydrocarbons (oils and greases), lint, dirt, and more. As a matter of fact, these contaminants act as fuel that are capable of easily igniting in high oxygen environments. Because of this, oxygen cleaning is a critical process to remove these contaminants from the instrument prior to installation.

Ambulance Oxygen System Pressure Transducers

Core Sensors offers oxygen cleaning on nearly all of it products and can meet certification standards such as:

• Praxair GS-38
• CGA G-4.1
• Mil Std 1330-D
• ASTM G93 Test I&II
• SAE ARP 1176

Once the pressure sensor is oxygen cleaned, it is stored in a vacuum sealed bag and clearly marked as “Oxygen Cleaned.” The pressure sensor should not be opened until it is time to install in the ambulance oxygen system pressure monitor. We offer certificates of oxygen cleaning upon request.

Common Configuration

Ambulances typically carry one or two M style tanks that supply oxygen to the onboard systems. For example, the most common pressure sensor configuration that we encounter for these tanks is Model# CS10-2A02500PS1L032-03. Breaking down this configuration, we have:

• CS10 industrial pressure transducer
• 1/4″ Male NPT process connection
• 316L SS wetted material
• 0-2,500 PSI sealed gauge pressure range
• 1-5 V output signal (10-28 VDC supply)
• 3 meters of integral cable
• oxygen clean to PraxAir GS-38 standards

While this is the most common configuration, we also offer customizable configurations to ensure ease of installation and setup. For example, depending on the power supply available onboard the ambulance, we offer pressure sensors that will operate off of voltages down to 3 V. Also, instead of integral cable, we offer high quality connectors such as the Turck M12x1 Eurofast and DIN forms A & C.

Pressure ranges over 30 PSI use a monolithic piece of stainless steel. This is beneficial for oxygen applications as there are no oil filled diaphragms that could potentially rupture and contaminate the entire system. In addition, there are no O-rings that could rupture and result in a leak.