China: Explosive Areas & Electrical Equip

Do like chinese in China.

..... and a large bowl of "Idi-oats" for your breakfast today for that insightful answer

I Do like chinese girls in from China.

Please to ensure explosive packed in green bamboo to lessen chance of very big bang:)

The Chinese have no standards that match IEC standards, what you have probably come across is where a Chinese manufacturers has made products to meet IEC standards, and being one of the largest suppliers of many IEC goods, that is no surprise.

There are no Chinese standards that exceed IEC standards, so you would be safe in applying the IEC which is now global, even in the US most companies have abandoned the Bullshit UL standard as it is simply a money grab for 10 times the price of an IEC examination of a product. 100k versus 10K so only the US government and a few idiots still rely on UL as a mark of anything. Sure its is a good standard but no better than the new IEC standard. Even in Australia the government holds more value in a CE mark than an Australian standards mark and the requirement level is higher.

As for matching, there are no linking or ways to match standards with the Chinese as they incorporate different areas together. Most of the IEC rated stuff coming from there is not too bad> just remember meeting a standard and high quality do not mean the same thing.

I am not sure what separate standard Chinese have. But now China is also member of IECEx. Thus, China has accepted IECEx standards ... IEC 60079-XX:YYYY. If at all China has published some standards based on these standards, there may be little additional clauses as "National difference".

USA used to use UL or FM standards. Now USA is also member of IECEx, though still many customers ask for FM or UL mark. Now, slowly they will also shift to IEC.

FM standards are good, and available free of charge.

UL standards are available free once you get UL mark to any of your product. Otherwise they are available at cost.

UL standards are costly, as IEC standards are also costly.

Australia and NL doesn't accept CE mark. They accept only IECEx.

The main intention of forming IECEx is to avoid duplicate certifications under ATEX, IEC, FM/UL, GOST and some Japanese/ Korean standards. Though most of the European coutures are members of IECEx, still they are not accepting IECEx, and still ATEX is prevailing .

This is the whole scenario of the standards.

In general you can use IEC standards as well as ISO standards and that should comply with the majority of cases, but go to the Chinese government bureau of standards and inquire about the standards they must adhere to officially

thanks for the responses.... i posed the original question and decided to create an account and join.

so follow up question then is:

there are different protection methods that can be used in hazardous areas according to IEC 60079 then.

Prevent potential ignition arising -> increased safety (60079-7), type -n protection (60079-15)

Limit the ignition energy of equipment -> intrinsic safety (60079-11)

Prevent explosive atmosphere contacting ignition source -> encapsulation/oil immersion/etc. (60079-18)

My question is, if my goal is to prevent sparks from igniting any combustible gases in the area, which one of these would be cheapest? which one would be most effective?

I intend on getting answers from some motor vendors, but with holidays doubt i'll be able to get in touch with many vendors.

This is somewhat embarrassing--I used to do a lot of work with hazardous areas and (so called) explosionproof equipment, but I'm drawing some blanks. A few things I can tell you:

• as soon as you talk a motor of any size (I mean, anything that uses a few watts of power), you are outside the range of intrinsic safety--an intrinsically safe device is one that can't produce a spark with enough energy to ignite the substance in question.
• if you can do anything to move the electrical equipment out of the hazardous environment, you will be ahead of the game
• explosionproof equipment requires high standards of maintenance(these are typically enclosed in enclosures which will cool the gases from any explosion inside the enclosure such that they are cool enough to avoid igniting an explosive mixture outside the enclosure). There are stringent requirments on clearances and such that must be maintained.

What I can't remember at the moment are any circumstances when we've ventilated an area to change the classification, and what the requirements were to do that--oh, I'm vaguely remembering some enclosures we purged with air from outside the hazardous area. Darn--it's a b___ getting old.