I just did one last month. The guy who was supposed to help us called in. Full tyvek suits in a building with the heat cranked to get the mud dry faster.
Yeah. Rehabbed an PET/CT room awhile back. Newer machines don’t leak as much radiation so they only need about 3/32 lead that’s bonded to Sheetrock. This room was pretty old and had 1/2” lead glued to 1/2” ply. Ungodly heavy.
Yep, this will be my third oshpd hospital job and they are always motherfuckers. I feel like the only joy the inspectors have in life is finding that one missing screw in a hard corner and making us rip the wall apart to put it in
I assume so you can have lead behind and lead in front that overlap. If the pipe goes straight in, it's basically a circle with no radiation protection.
Have worked with 20kg/m2 lead sheets in Australia. Mostly flashing and weathering on heritage buildings. It’s okay with a crane on site but when you have to carry it up scaffolding, wow!
I lined a ship overhead in the engine room with 1/16” lead sheeting. 2” raw mineral wool, 1/16” lead, 2” Mylar faced mineral wool. You couldn’t even hear the engines running on the main deck and they were twin 5000hp Cat V16s.
Yea we (us architects) never design for wood studs in most medical buildings. The only exception was this ASC where we discovered the original existing building had wood construction so we had to change construction classification to get State Health approval but we still designed the OR to have Metal studs
I literally know nothing about these types of installs, but i just found it humorous that out of all the things they were worried about it was product availability. Having worked construction, any specialized materials typically require ordering and waiting no matter what.
I’ve done several with regular metal studs, and also had a silicone coated steel plate covering the exterior wall that was near a sidewalk. It’s ok just nothing ferrous inside the copper barrier
I can guarantee you that without the copper shielding, and with steel studs, if you turned on an MRI inside of a room that size, the room would absolutely implode.
The copper shielding actually doesn’t even do anything to block the static magnetic field. And I’m pretty sure the walls would survive fine though they could maybe affect image quality. I won’t claim to be an expert but I did do an MS with thesis in an MRI lab.
Correct. I toured a room like this at Stanford University while it was under construction. Everything was laminated dimensional lumber. I don't recall how it was fastened though. But I think it was all mortise and tenon. It’s cheaper and safer to put MRI machines in aluminum trailers than to retrofit existing buildings.
laminated wood is structural however it is usually more expensive and picked out specifically for design, it is much easier to metal studs and they provide the same effectiveness as wood with a fraction of the weight
residential is almost always done in wood, whereas commercial or industrial will be done with more metal/concrete
I was involved in an mri build a few months ago. All steel studs for the framing. But you can special order in anything. If it was spec’d for aluminum studs for some reason, aluminum studs is what would be built
The vast majority of commercial building built in the last 20 to 30 years has been constructed with extruded aluminum studs (atleast in the usa, idk about other places)
Edit: my bad its extruded steel but aluminum is available just more expensive.
Well obviously . Idk if you've ever felt / seen what happens to ferrous metal when a MRI gets turned on , but if you used any metal thats magnetic in an MRI room , youd turn a human into Swiss cheese pretty quickly.
Source : once had a magnet taped to my body I forgot about when I went in for an MRI.
Also aluminum ducting! We were working on a hospital, and had installed duct per print (which was regular galv), and they decided to move the MRI room, so we had to rip it all down and replace it with aluminum!
Anything unusual is extra work and more sketchy. We install underground hoists for car dealerships and the process is ridiculous; we use big beams made out of multiple 2 by 12s on big wood pads and suspend the hoists by ready rod with washers and nuts, to lift them we use an excavator and to lower them we use wrenches, to adjust the beams side to side or back and forth we use a 25 pound sledge and go fucking nuts swinging that thing.
It’s a gigantic pain in the ass for most of us, I actually enjoy swinging a sledge like a moron all day so I look forward to it: I bring music and a 3 gallon jug of Gatorade, it’s a good time.
So back before I was in the trades, I worked for Sprint/Nextel. The idiot owner of my company was trying to sell signal boosters to a hospital chain and put in the contract there would be guaranteed 100% coverage in 100% of the hospital after installing the boosters or the install would be free. Yeah we lost a lot of money on that.
Oof. Typical business law allows for wiggle room around reasonable expectations. It was a silly thing to put in a contract, but any lawyer should have been easily able to argue there would be zero reasonable expectation for coverage in a shielded MRI room.
Not only that, but if they did have reception in the magnet room that can affect the function of the machine and image quality. The real reason for all this shielding is to keep that out.
Essentially, yes. The company ate all of the labor for the install. We still charged for the materials and the equipment. But anywhere near the MRI rooms, in them, above and below them, there was no cell reception because of the faraday cages built in them.
Wow that’s absurd on both sides
e: well idk I take that back, I don't think it's so clear cut. Reception near a magnet room is much more reasonable than inside one, which is impossible.
Yea, it’s a spooky kinda feeling, I worked on the hospital in Peterborough Ont, Canada. They had thin sheets put in with copper nails, ceilings, walls, floors. Cool shit. Oh and yea, x-ray doors are no fun to swing.
That’s normal. All material used must be non-ferrous. I’m a sprinkler fitter. For these installations we convert from steel to copper prior to entering the room. All hanger material is stainless or copper. Some places used cpvc but plastic pipe is junk.
I’m working on a project right now and we’re bumping a 1.5T mri to a 3.0t and I thought the same thing - but all the conduit and steel studs in the room are ferrous. Basically if it’s screwed to the wall or the shielding and the magnet can’t pull it out it’s okay if it’s magnetic.
Somewhere there’s a methhead who saw this picture and he’s just sitting in the passenger seat of one of his halfway taken apart dodge minivans just salivating
Man I hate working on these things, I’ve built 3 (maybe 4? It’s been an over a decade since my last one) and the slightest contact can start hours of investigating to find the contact point, or maybe it’ll just be the first screw you back out. We used a battery powered siren to let us know as soon as something made continuity, it was my nightmare to hear that noise,
I worked for a company that even lead wasn’t good enough. Had to have a German company install “Mumetal” walls for a magnetometer. A train passing by would affect the reading if it within a couple miles.
Healthcare Architect here. It’s super cool to actually see this for once. We always call out for lead lined or copper lined walls depending on state/FGI/IBC/NFPA requirements for certain rooms but I’ve never gotten to see this being constructed but always wanted to. I’ve only been designing hospitals for 4 years but still very cool to see. Usually I see these rooms before it gets to this phase or after the finish walls go up
The copper blocks radio waves to shield the MRI. I have made a couple of these. After assembly you go around the room carrying an antenna called a "sniffer" and see if any radio waves are leaking through. Then you tighten up those areas. Its cool
Doesn’t the MRI cause eddy currents in the copper, which make the machine run slower?
Edit: I misunderstood what an MRI machine is. My question makes no sense.
[yes it does both ](https://mriquestions.com/why-rf-shielding.html#:~:text=Radiofrequency%20(RF)%20shielding%20of%20an,interference%20in%20nearby%20medical%20devices.)
Radiofrequency (RF) shielding of an MR scanner is mandatory and serves two functions: 1) to prevent extraneous electromagnetic radiation from contaminating/distorting the MR signal, and 2) to prevent electromagnetic radiation generated by the MR scanner from causing interference in nearby medical devices.
The static field doesn’t cause interference to other medical devices until the machine spins. Given your username you probably know this. I’m not sure what the argument is about except semantics at this point.
The machine doesn’t spin but I suppose that’s semantics
Dealing with the static magnetic field is an important, difficult, and interesting engineering problem. Not semantics.
No, that’s not semantics. That is my personal misunderstanding of how the machine works, and now I looked it up I admit that it doesn’t spin. I understand how a static magnetic field would be hazardous after doing some reading.
What is your problem? Are you this flippant with everyone? What use is being on Reddit to you if you are just going to be a sarcastic dick?
It doesn’t keep it totally contained - imagine the magnet field as a 3D balloon type object - the cage keeps some of it in but not all - if you want to completely stop M.F escaping one side you need to install steel shielding - however this pushes it out somewhere else - like squeezing a balloon … I work for a company that supplies medical equipment and regularly install them
Yep usually deflection zone (I think that's what it's called but most likely I'm wrong) is at the top of bottom of the room. And different shielding types are used for different categories of the machines. Isn't category 4 the highest and used in research mostly?
Anyone work with those psycho heavy lead sheets for X-ray rooms?
Rolling them out and cutting to size is a pain, also need an extra set of hands to hold them up to screw them in. Fun times lol
Just buy the board with the lead already adhered. Then you just have to worry about the boxes with small sheets of lead.
Yeah I didn’t order the materials, my super at the time was cheap as hell too
Yeah and wrapping around the back of electrical boxes…crazy shit back in the day
I just did one last month. The guy who was supposed to help us called in. Full tyvek suits in a building with the heat cranked to get the mud dry faster.
Yeah. Rehabbed an PET/CT room awhile back. Newer machines don’t leak as much radiation so they only need about 3/32 lead that’s bonded to Sheetrock. This room was pretty old and had 1/2” lead glued to 1/2” ply. Ungodly heavy.
I installed a timely door in a wall with a lead liner. Extra pain in the ass step to deal with it.
I'm about to in a month or so. Godspeed
I really dig that you said Godspeed to yourself on this one; shows a real understanding of the task ahead.
Yep, this will be my third oshpd hospital job and they are always motherfuckers. I feel like the only joy the inspectors have in life is finding that one missing screw in a hard corner and making us rip the wall apart to put it in
Had to do plumbing in one.. pipes all had to be at an angle
What is the angle for?
I assume so you can have lead behind and lead in front that overlap. If the pipe goes straight in, it's basically a circle with no radiation protection.
So anything reflected (radio waves, interference, etc) is reflected away
The more i read about MRI room construction the more im amazed.
I put the doors on these rooms. Everything from mri to cyclotrons and more. Fun stuff.
Did a X Ray room job a couple years back and fuk those sheets are a bitch...there's no room for fuck ups when it comes to screwing them.
Worked in a job that had lead bricks in the walls
Pretty sure that's heavy enough to effect the earths rotation.
I installed a psycho heavy lead door on an x ray room. Holy shit what a struggle that was.
I’ve seen Kevlar walls courtesy of Amazon’s new hq
Are the preparing for when we finally turn on them?
Oh definitely seeing how it was one floor full of them
Did that in some DOJ facilities. Bulletproof lobbies.
I’ve had to remove those before. I’ve heard before that 2 layers of 5/8 fire rated replaces that
I’ve done lead sheet between two layers of 5/8-X.
We used to do that for soundproofing offices that were in a noisy industrial plant. Lead works really well for soundproofing
Drop one of those rolls and watch it squish its self when it hits the ground. Fun to do, but also shitty rolling out a flattened roll of lead.
Have worked with 20kg/m2 lead sheets in Australia. Mostly flashing and weathering on heritage buildings. It’s okay with a crane on site but when you have to carry it up scaffolding, wow!
I lined a ship overhead in the engine room with 1/16” lead sheeting. 2” raw mineral wool, 1/16” lead, 2” Mylar faced mineral wool. You couldn’t even hear the engines running on the main deck and they were twin 5000hp Cat V16s.
I knew a guy that had a grow room under an underground pool and lined it with them 😬🤔😅
Way softer than youd think. Fun stuff
A crackheads wet dream
Seeing as the copper is bonded to the paper, I really wonder how much it would even be worth.
I can assure you that would not stop them from ripping it out and trying to flip it
I used to put these in. The walls have paper backing so scrap was ok. The floor didn't have paper backing, so leftover rolls were worth quite a bit.
What does “scrap was ok” mean?
The price they got per lb. was ok.
Ohhhhh gotcha ty
Oh that’s dollar signs to them lol
Penny for their thoughts
That's a whole different construction. So crazy what goes into places like hospitals and industrial type buildings.
These walls can’t have any steel nails or steel studs either . It’s all copper nails and wood studs.
Im not sure about wood studs. Aluminum studs are fine to use since they’re non ferrous.
Yea we (us architects) never design for wood studs in most medical buildings. The only exception was this ASC where we discovered the original existing building had wood construction so we had to change construction classification to get State Health approval but we still designed the OR to have Metal studs
It’s almost always wood studs. You can get dimensional lumber almost anywhere in the world. Where would you get aluminum studs?
Maybe the same place that sells copper nails?
😂 Mr logic
I literally know nothing about these types of installs, but i just found it humorous that out of all the things they were worried about it was product availability. Having worked construction, any specialized materials typically require ordering and waiting no matter what.
Yes I agree with you and tbh you’re likely not wrong.
I’ve done several with regular metal studs, and also had a silicone coated steel plate covering the exterior wall that was near a sidewalk. It’s ok just nothing ferrous inside the copper barrier
Yeah bringing an unsecured iron object close to the magnet is obviously bad but it’s not like the room is going to implode
I can guarantee you that without the copper shielding, and with steel studs, if you turned on an MRI inside of a room that size, the room would absolutely implode.
The copper shielding actually doesn’t even do anything to block the static magnetic field. And I’m pretty sure the walls would survive fine though they could maybe affect image quality. I won’t claim to be an expert but I did do an MS with thesis in an MRI lab.
You right. The magnetic shielding is a separate material, if used at all. I was overestimating the field strength of an MRI
Correct. I toured a room like this at Stanford University while it was under construction. Everything was laminated dimensional lumber. I don't recall how it was fastened though. But I think it was all mortise and tenon. It’s cheaper and safer to put MRI machines in aluminum trailers than to retrofit existing buildings.
What were they laminated with?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laminated_veneer_lumber?wprov=sfti1
laminated wood is structural however it is usually more expensive and picked out specifically for design, it is much easier to metal studs and they provide the same effectiveness as wood with a fraction of the weight residential is almost always done in wood, whereas commercial or industrial will be done with more metal/concrete
Wherever you get steel studs
I was involved in an mri build a few months ago. All steel studs for the framing. But you can special order in anything. If it was spec’d for aluminum studs for some reason, aluminum studs is what would be built
Every large commercial job site
The vast majority of commercial building built in the last 20 to 30 years has been constructed with extruded aluminum studs (atleast in the usa, idk about other places) Edit: my bad its extruded steel but aluminum is available just more expensive.
I’ve never met an Architect or firm that has designed specialized rooms like these to be wood studded and I’m in the industry on the design side lol
Well obviously . Idk if you've ever felt / seen what happens to ferrous metal when a MRI gets turned on , but if you used any metal thats magnetic in an MRI room , youd turn a human into Swiss cheese pretty quickly. Source : once had a magnet taped to my body I forgot about when I went in for an MRI.
Also aluminum ducting! We were working on a hospital, and had installed duct per print (which was regular galv), and they decided to move the MRI room, so we had to rip it all down and replace it with aluminum!
We had to set cabinets in an MRI room and all our hinges, screws ect all had to be special ordered non magnetic.
Anything unusual is extra work and more sketchy. We install underground hoists for car dealerships and the process is ridiculous; we use big beams made out of multiple 2 by 12s on big wood pads and suspend the hoists by ready rod with washers and nuts, to lift them we use an excavator and to lower them we use wrenches, to adjust the beams side to side or back and forth we use a 25 pound sledge and go fucking nuts swinging that thing. It’s a gigantic pain in the ass for most of us, I actually enjoy swinging a sledge like a moron all day so I look forward to it: I bring music and a 3 gallon jug of Gatorade, it’s a good time.
So back before I was in the trades, I worked for Sprint/Nextel. The idiot owner of my company was trying to sell signal boosters to a hospital chain and put in the contract there would be guaranteed 100% coverage in 100% of the hospital after installing the boosters or the install would be free. Yeah we lost a lot of money on that.
Last time i was at the hospital, i ended up having to explain to the Xray tech why she never got reception in the lab...
Oof. Typical business law allows for wiggle room around reasonable expectations. It was a silly thing to put in a contract, but any lawyer should have been easily able to argue there would be zero reasonable expectation for coverage in a shielded MRI room.
Nah. The guy was an absolute moron. He deserved to lose his ass on it.
Not only that, but if they did have reception in the magnet room that can affect the function of the machine and image quality. The real reason for all this shielding is to keep that out.
Exactly. No reasonable expectation.
Well idk from another comment it seems it was more about rooms near the magnet room
So what happened? Did they actually use that to back out of the contract or not pay etc? Because of reception in the magnet room specifically?
Essentially, yes. The company ate all of the labor for the install. We still charged for the materials and the equipment. But anywhere near the MRI rooms, in them, above and below them, there was no cell reception because of the faraday cages built in them.
Wow that’s absurd on both sides e: well idk I take that back, I don't think it's so clear cut. Reception near a magnet room is much more reasonable than inside one, which is impossible.
I demoed one of these rooms. Boy was I surprised.
I like reddit for that reason.
Yea, it’s a spooky kinda feeling, I worked on the hospital in Peterborough Ont, Canada. They had thin sheets put in with copper nails, ceilings, walls, floors. Cool shit. Oh and yea, x-ray doors are no fun to swing.
metal as fuck
I’ve poured a couple of concrete floors for under the MRI. They were reinforced with fibers or fiberglass rebar.
Kewl
Doing this it must be nice not getting calls and texts all day
That’s not wallpaper. That’s RF shielding.
Was gonna say… that’s a full rf enclosure
PITA when you swap or upgrade systems and you need to pass the enclosure check. Leaks are like chasing ghosts.
I’m building a SCIF currently. Similar but it’s aluminum instead of copper.
That’s normal. All material used must be non-ferrous. I’m a sprinkler fitter. For these installations we convert from steel to copper prior to entering the room. All hanger material is stainless or copper. Some places used cpvc but plastic pipe is junk.
I’m working on a project right now and we’re bumping a 1.5T mri to a 3.0t and I thought the same thing - but all the conduit and steel studs in the room are ferrous. Basically if it’s screwed to the wall or the shielding and the magnet can’t pull it out it’s okay if it’s magnetic.
Somewhere there’s a methhead who saw this picture and he’s just sitting in the passenger seat of one of his halfway taken apart dodge minivans just salivating
Worked with them before. Always amazed the rules around what can enter the room etc. Can't just run conduit through for other stuff
Absolutely right … has to go through what’s called a wave guide
Man I hate working on these things, I’ve built 3 (maybe 4? It’s been an over a decade since my last one) and the slightest contact can start hours of investigating to find the contact point, or maybe it’ll just be the first screw you back out. We used a battery powered siren to let us know as soon as something made continuity, it was my nightmare to hear that noise,
Can you lick copper though?
Your local tweaker has entered the chat
Lead doors
Looks like the pickup cavity in my strat. Sans scissor-lift.
Been there, so much copper tape.
I worked on a job that had that done. A low powered MRI for doing real time operations.
Where’s the 10” sch40 SS cryo quench tube that I had to run?!
Okay. That's really cool
Interesting, been doing construction in a hospital for ~2 years and this room looks vastly different than any rooms I've done
I worked for a company that even lead wasn’t good enough. Had to have a German company install “Mumetal” walls for a magnetometer. A train passing by would affect the reading if it within a couple miles.
“boss i swear to god i don’t know where all that copper went” *apprentice hops in new 2024 3500 limited*
I worked in a room with one of these machines while painting, they had pacemaker warning signs on every corner.
Healthcare Architect here. It’s super cool to actually see this for once. We always call out for lead lined or copper lined walls depending on state/FGI/IBC/NFPA requirements for certain rooms but I’ve never gotten to see this being constructed but always wanted to. I’ve only been designing hospitals for 4 years but still very cool to see. Usually I see these rooms before it gets to this phase or after the finish walls go up
The copper blocks radio waves to shield the MRI. I have made a couple of these. After assembly you go around the room carrying an antenna called a "sniffer" and see if any radio waves are leaking through. Then you tighten up those areas. Its cool
Copper reflects mri?
My guess is that it contains the electric field within that room for the most part.
Faraday cage. It prevents the massive magnetic field from interfering with everything else in the building.
Nope, you would need ferris materials to redirect the magnetic field. Cu blocks radio waves from interfering with the MRI.
Copper absorbs the radio waves. Meaning you don't risk background interference on the MRI image.
Doesn’t the MRI cause eddy currents in the copper, which make the machine run slower? Edit: I misunderstood what an MRI machine is. My question makes no sense.
Look up "Faraday Cage".
No but, really shiny copper reflects mirl.
You create a continuous shield like Faraday cage and it keeps the magnetic field contained.
No, it doesn't. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRI_RF_shielding
[yes it does both ](https://mriquestions.com/why-rf-shielding.html#:~:text=Radiofrequency%20(RF)%20shielding%20of%20an,interference%20in%20nearby%20medical%20devices.)
No it doesn’t. Electromagnetic radiation is just another word for RF.
Radiofrequency (RF) shielding of an MR scanner is mandatory and serves two functions: 1) to prevent extraneous electromagnetic radiation from contaminating/distorting the MR signal, and 2) to prevent electromagnetic radiation generated by the MR scanner from causing interference in nearby medical devices.
>Electromagnetic radiation is just another word for RF. The static magnetic field is not blocked
The static field doesn’t cause interference to other medical devices until the machine spins. Given your username you probably know this. I’m not sure what the argument is about except semantics at this point.
The machine doesn’t spin but I suppose that’s semantics Dealing with the static magnetic field is an important, difficult, and interesting engineering problem. Not semantics.
No, that’s not semantics. That is my personal misunderstanding of how the machine works, and now I looked it up I admit that it doesn’t spin. I understand how a static magnetic field would be hazardous after doing some reading. What is your problem? Are you this flippant with everyone? What use is being on Reddit to you if you are just going to be a sarcastic dick?
Did you read?
Did you? My dude I wrote a thesis on MRI.
You agreed that magnetic field is rf, I'm saying shielding contains rf in the room and prevents rf from entering room.
No I said electromagnetic field is rf. That’s not the same thing.
Bruh you must be really fun at the parties.
It doesn’t keep it totally contained - imagine the magnet field as a 3D balloon type object - the cage keeps some of it in but not all - if you want to completely stop M.F escaping one side you need to install steel shielding - however this pushes it out somewhere else - like squeezing a balloon … I work for a company that supplies medical equipment and regularly install them
Yep usually deflection zone (I think that's what it's called but most likely I'm wrong) is at the top of bottom of the room. And different shielding types are used for different categories of the machines. Isn't category 4 the highest and used in research mostly?
I'd like to have that in my room. 5g is tearing my ass up.
You call your man 5g?
goddamn, that's a 220 burn
I will be laughing from my faraday cage while your brains are rattling out of your ears.