Pinson Technical Consulting LLC

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.