![]() ![]() There are fourteen jurisdictions in Canada (one federal, ten provincial and three territorial) and each has it’s own occupational health and safety legislation.Įach of these refers to protecting the employee from electrical hazards but do not go into much more detail than that. “1910.269(l)(8)(ii) - For each employee exposed to hazards from electric arcs, the employer shall make a reasonable estimate of the incident heat energy to which the employee would be exposed.”Īs I mentioned in chapter 1, the only practical way to make an estimate of the incident heat energy is by performing an arc flash study. You can find this requirement listed in the standard 1910.269 Electric power generation, transmission, and distribution. Is an Arc Flash Study Required by OSHA?Īs of January 1, 2015, an arc flash study is required by OSHA. Since the two most prominent standards on electrical safety and arc flash are NFPA70E and CSAZ462 I’ll focus on the United States and Canada respectively. This really does boil down to what country you work in. Now that you’ve got some of the basics down of what an arc flash is and how deadly it is you need to know what your responsibilities are from a legal standpoint. CHAPTER 2: Legal Requirements and Liability Arc flash studies will use the short circuit study results (both max and min) in combination with the equipment’s protective device curve to determine the trip time and thus the incident energy or arc flash hazard of the equipment. A short circuit study is performed to calculate the magnitude of current at each piece of equipment in the event of a fault or short circuit. A short circuit study is merely one of the steps to an arc flash study. Is arc flash study the same as short circuit study? You need to know the maximum fault clearing time.Īnd in order to figure them out, you need to do about 95% of the work required to do an arc flash study.Īnd if that’s not enough of a reason to stay away from this method, once you are done you get a very conservative estimation of the hazard level (which means wearing more PPE than necessary).You need to know the maximum available short circuit current and.To make a long story short it has two major hurdles to overcome: The alternative to doing an arc flash study is using what’s called the Arc Flash PPE Category Method (sometimes referred to as the Arc Flash PPE Category Table Method). I say there is no practical way of knowing because there is another method but it is not very useful and I’ve never come across a company in any industry that has implemented it correctly. Your arc flash training would provide an understanding of the risk. Specifically, the severity of the hazard can range from the onset of 2nd-degree burns (1.2 cal/cm2) to catastrophic levels of heat (which would be deadly). Why is an Arc Flash Study Important?Īn arc flash study is important because without it your workers (either your employees or contractors) have no practical way of knowing how hazardous the equipment is that they are working on.Įlectrical safety (all safety for that matter) comes down to understanding two things.Īn arc flash study provides an understanding of the hazard. Typically, every piece of electrical equipment will have a different incident energy level (unless it’s fed from the exact same location). The arc flash study produces all the information required to label each piece of electrical equipment with the specific level of the incident energy (measured in cal/cm2) available at each individual piece of equipment. What is an Arc Flash Study?Īn arc flash study (also known as an arc flash analysis) is an electrical engineering analysis of a facility’s electrical distribution system that determines how hot an electric arc explosion can get (what’s known as the incident energy) at any point that a worker might interact with that system. So, in this chapter that’s what we are going to go over.Īnd we’ll start with a basic definition. ![]() Whether you are a maintenance manager, safety professional or electrical supervisor at some point you will need to evaluate the necessity of an arc flash study at your facility (or facilities).īefore we get into the details, I want to make sure you have a good handle of the basics of an arc flash study. Chapter 6: What Comes After an Arc Flash Study.Chapter 4: Getting an Arc Flash Study Done.Chapter 3: Benefits of an Arc Flash Study.Chapter 2: Legal Requirements and Liability. ![]()
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