What is a Hazardous Area Inspection?

In electrical engineering, hazardous locations are defined as places where fire or explosion hazards may exist due to flammable gases, flammable liquid–produced vapours, combustible liquid–produced vapours, combustible dusts, or ignitable fibres/flyings present in the air in quantities sufficient to produce explosive or ignitable mixtures.

Hazardous Areas (Potentially Explosive Atmospheres) are defined in terms of Zones and Safe Areas under relevant IEC (for IEC-Ex) and EN (for ATEX) standards depending on the expected frequency and duration of an explosive atmosphere being present.       (Zone 0, 1, 2, 20, 21, 22)

DesignPro delivers complete projects and maintenance services to companies throughout Asia and internationally, from installation, inspection, commissioning and maintenance, we support customers across a wide range of industry sectors, including chemical, oil, gas, offshore, petrochemical, power generation and heavy engineering industries.

Our Hazardous Area Services include:

• Installation, Inspection and Testing and Maintenance of Electrical Installations in Hazardous Areas accordance to IEC 60079.

Our highly trained and experienced EEHA certified engineers, technicians and electricians have specialized expertise in “Hazardous Area” electrical installation, inspection and testing, and maintenance of installations employing types of protection ‘d’, ‘e’, ’n’ and ’i’ as defined by IEC 60079 standards and our team are also qualified and certified and have the correct Statements of Attainment to undertake the installation, inspection and maintenance works in Hazardous Areas.

Our hazardous area inspection services provide assistance with the compliance of electrical installations in potentially explosive atmospheres for new and existing plants and we assist customers with optimising their Ex asset performance, safety and integrity through delivering the following hazardous area inspection services:

•     Ex/Hazardous Inspection of existing and new Ex equipment
  •     Hazardous Area Inspection Strategy Development & Implementation
  •     Ensuring Verification of all Installed ‘Ex’ Equipment Databases
  •     Ensuring Compliance with all Standards and Regulations
  •     Ex/Hazardous Installation & Maintenance Project Management

We carry out inspections for clients that may only have a few items, to clients that have thousands of items for inspection. We work with clients to provide a path towards full compliance under the mandatory Requirements of IEC 60079-17/14

ATEX is driven by EU law whereas IEC-Ex is a voluntary certification scheme. It is to be noted that ATEX is not accepted in some countries. Both however, provide an accepted means of proving compliance with IEC standards.