Patent ID: 8711325

Claim:
A method for determining a suppression factor of a suppression system, the suppression system arranged to suppress migration of a contaminant gas out of a first system, the suppression factor being an indication of the performance of the suppression system, the method comprising: introducing a tracer gas in the first system; detecting an amount of the tracer gas that has migrated out of the first system; determining a first suppression factor for the suppression system for the tracer gas; and determining a second suppression factor for the suppression system for the contaminant gas based on the first suppression factor, wherein the second suppression factor, S cont , is computed from the first suppression factor, S tracer , by: S cont =S tracer ( D tracer /D cont ) where D tracer is the diffusion coefficient of the tracer gas and D cont is the diffusion coefficient of the contaminant gas.