Pinson Technical Consulting LLC

Assisting your success in World Wide haz/loc approval of your products,

shortening your time to market!

Want to get your product through UL, FM or CSA  faster ?  

Learn how to get it done with World Wide (North American, ATEX, & IECEx)  approvals all together?

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The CHALLENGE

There are many hazardous areas ("hazardous location") where electronic and electro-mechanical products are used:  Oil & Gas Drilling Industry, Petroleum Refining, the Grain Industry, Furniture Factories, and any vehicle with a gas tank, especially large vehicles and those in the air and on the sea.  There are many product types & industries affected - sensing & instrumentation, automation & controls, safety monitoring products.  If your company makes such products for these areas and industries, you have this CHALLENGE.


In order to ensure your product is safe for your customer to use in one of these hazardous areas, and in order to obtain approval for your product to be used in a hazardous area, your product must be designed in order to be compliant.  This may sound easy at first thought, but safety standards are very complex.  Many safety and standard related design details are required, and often those requirements seem to conflict with other design requirements.  This is especially challenging when Intrinsic Safety (I.S.) is the appropriate safety approach for the product's application.  While choosing I.S. solves many challenges such as product cost, installation cost (such as avoiding high cost of accessory items like purge systems & explosionproof/flameproof housings), I.S. has many design challenges, most of which are internal to the device, both in its mechanical design, and its electronic design.  Other safety approaches present their own challenges as well.


These technical challenges to the design often result in required redesign mid-stream during a certification project with the Notified Body (NB) or NRTL (e.g. UL, FM Approvals, CSA, etc.).  Such design "churn" creates much project delay, as well as many man-hours of project cost, additional testing costs, etc.  So, strategies to improve the compliance of the design up-front, and strategies to improve and streamline design change response and mid-project discussions with the NB or NRTL are needed to avoid that "churn" and shorten the certification project time, thus achieving a more competitive time-to-market.

To add to these challenges, the NB or NRTL has varying interpretation of standards, depending on their project staff and their experience, plus the certification industry changes industry-common interpretations of standards over time.  It's really tough to not have someone on your engineers' side to either defend a sound but misunderstood design detail in discussions with the NB or NRTL, or to advise a design change early on to avoid a problem and work stoppage.

Most companies don't have experts in this area in their employ, and even if their engineers develop good sound and apparently compliant solutions, they may face the challenge of effectively articulating a good defense of the safety and compliance of their design solution so that the NB or NRTL sees the compliance and accepts the solution.  Also, many companies cannot justify employing such an expert full time.


Pinson Technical Consulting can provide you this expertise,

for the length of time you need.

We provide advice and assistance in the following areas:

• Strategies for reducing certification project time, shortening time-to-market

• Design for Intrinsic Safety, at the component level and at the system level

• Design for Electrical Safety Compliance and for Electromagnetic Compliance

• Design for Hazardous Locations (“Haz/Loc”)

• Design to meet world-wide requirements (ATEX, IECEx, AEx/North American)

• Compliance to electronics industry standards, particularly IPC

• Project Management for Product Development that includes certifications

• QA and Manufacturing issues relating to certification (e.g ATEX & IECEx - QAN & QAR)

• DFM, DFT, QA and Manufacturing issues relating to PCB/PCBA, cabling and electronic assemblies

Our expertise includes:

ATEX  |  IECEx  |  North American - both Class/Div & Class/Zone ("AEx")


Intrinsic Safety  |  Fieldbus Intrinsic Safety Concept (FISCO)


EMC (ElectroMagnetic Compliance)  |  EMI issues


Project Management  |  Project Planning  |  Lean PD  |  ISO 9001


IPC Standards for PCB & PCBA  |  PCBA Layout Challenges (e.g. EMI, I.S. spacings, Switching P/S) 


Wire & Cable Materials  |  Wire & Cable for Haz/Loc & Shipboard


Standards:


EN, IEC & UL 60079 family

UL913

EN & IEC 61010

NFPA 70 Article 500

IEC 61000 family, CISPR 11

IEEE standards for shipboard cabling

IPC 2221  |  IPC 2222  |  IPC 6011  |  IPC 6012  |  IPC 4101

IPC-A-600  |  IPC-A-610  |  J-STD-001



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