Case Study: Engineering an HVAC Enclosure for Air-Cooled Systems

For the last 20 years, TotalShield has been leading the shielding enclosure industry, partnering with organizations across aerospace, energy, manufacturing, and research to solve some of their most demanding containment challenges. 

In this installment of our case studies series, we look at the large HVAC enclosure and mobile barrier system built for a thermal management company’s chiller pressure-testing process.

Our customer’s request: A large custom HVAC enclosure

A thermal management company specializing in cooling systems for data centers, healthcare, clean rooms, and life sciences facilities approached TotalShield with a specific need: a large custom shielding room for testing large air-cooled chiller assemblies.

Our customer designs and manufactures advanced thermal management equipment with a focus on energy efficiency, water conservation, and reduced carbon footprint, and its testing process is central to ensuring every chiller performs reliably before it reaches a customer’s facility.

As part of their manufacturing process, every air-cooled chiller assembly goes through a pressurization test before it’s cleared to move forward in production, an essential step to ensuring each unit performs reliably once it reaches a customer’s facility.

That is why they turned to TotalShield, and our engineering team leveraged more than two decades of experience in impact and containment engineering to design the right shielding solution for their needs.

Containing a high-pressure testing process

Before a chiller assembly ever leaves our customer’s facility, it goes through a carefully controlled testing sequence designed to catch any issues before they become field failures. Once a chiller is fully assembled, it’s moved into a dedicated testing bay. The entry and exit points are sealed, sensors and pneumatic hoses are connected, and a series of systems are activated to prepare the unit for testing.

From there, the chiller is pressurized using nitrogen while technicians monitor the system closely for leaks. Only after the unit passes this pressurization test is it cleared to move on to the next station in the production line.

Pressurized systems, by nature, carry the potential for sudden, forceful failure if something goes wrong, as we mention in our Pressure Testing Handbook. Our customer needed a way to protect the technicians running these tests without disrupting the workflow that makes their testing program effective, a common gap in industrial safety planning. 

Many facilities invest heavily in the equipment and processes needed to test their products, but the containment infrastructure protecting the people running those tests doesn’t always receive the same level of engineering attention. A shielding solution that isn’t built around the specific threat it’s meant to contain isn’t really a safety solution. 

The TotalShield Approach: Engineering an HVAC enclosure 

Our engineering team began by conducting an impact analysis based on our customer’s actual testing parameters: 

• the pneumatic pressure involved
• the characteristics of potential projectiles resulting from a failure
• total volume of the pressurized system

This data-driven approach, grounded in TotalShield’s 20+ years of experience in impact and containment engineering, shaped every element of the final design.  

Our engineers designed a combination of a custom shielding wall with mobile barriers that would work as a large shield room, configured to our customer’s exact testing bay layout. The shielding wall paired a row of impact-resistant transparent shielding material for visibility with a row of impact-resistant mild steel panels for structural protection, supported by reinforced framing. 

The mobile barriers extended that same level of protection with flexibility built in. Some of their features included:

• two additional rows of transparent shielding material 
• heavy-duty caster wheels for repositioning
• heavy-duty hoist rings
• above-floor steel plate protection. 

A locking mechanism was also added to allow the barrier to open from inside, ensuring technicians could exit quickly if needed.

Every HVAC panel of the enclosure and its components was engineered against the identified threats with a minimum 1.5 safety factor. That safety factor isn’t a marketing figure, it reflects a deliberate engineering margin between the maximum threat the system is designed to withstand and the actual demands of our customer’s process, giving our customer a documented and defensible level of protection rather than a general assurance.

Consistent with TotalShield’s engineering standards, the system was built without welded joints, which can behave unpredictably under sudden force, and without traditional hinges, which concentrate force at a single point. Instead, the design relies on our proprietary tested framing system and sliding access points for more reliable, even performance under load.

This HVAC enclosure is the product of more than two decades of experience engineering protection systems, grounded in technology that originated in national laboratory research and refined through independent third-party testing.

TotalShield’s installation support

Once the shielding barriers were manufactured, our engineering team visited our customer’s facility to supervise the installation of the shielding solution to make sure the system was set up correctly within the testing bay and ready to protect our customer’s personnel from day one. 

Our large HVAC custom enclosure, composed of a wall and shielding barriers, gave our customer’s technicians a level of protection engineered specifically around their pressure-testing process.  

The solution performed so well that our customer requested a second facility visit, this time to assess the layout for an additional large shielding room to support their expanding testing operations.

This project is a clear example of TotalShield’s collaborative approach, in which the team works with customers to:

• Evaluate the threat associated with a customer’s process or test
• Quantify that threat through detailed impact analysis grounded in the system’s real operating parameters
• Design and manufacture a shielding solution that mitigates the threat and protects personnel

In the videos below, you can see how our customer’s staff prepares for the pneumatic pressure test, moving their HVAC system inside the shielding barriers and carefully enclosing it with the mobile wall. 

Why this matters for facilities running repeated high-risk tests

For companies running any kind of repeated pressure testing, burst testing, or high-risk assembly validation, the containment enclosure around that process deserves the same engineering rigor as the process itself. 

A shielding solution that isn’t built around the specific pressures, projectile risks, and system volumes involved in a given test can create a false sense of security. Worse, it can fail exactly when it’s needed most.

That’s why our process always starts with understanding the actual threat profile of a customer’s operation. Every shielding solution we deliver is backed by a Letter Report that documents the threat level, the assumptions built into the design, and the testing behind the solution.  For facility directors, EHS managers, and procurement leads, that documentation matters. It transforms a containment structure from a piece of equipment into a backed-up safety system, one that can stand up to internal audits, insurance reviews, and regulatory scrutiny.

It also matters for the engineers and technicians actually running the tests day in and day out. When protective infrastructure is engineered specifically around the risks of a given process, rather than adapted from a generic template, the people working near that process can trust it. 

That trust translates directly into operational confidence: the ability to run tests on schedule, scale up testing frequency when needed, and focus on the work itself rather than worrying about the adequacy of the surrounding protection.

If your facility has a hazardous test process involving high pressure, heat, or ballistic risk, contact TotalShield to develop the right protective enclosure for your needs.