Leading the way in explosion protection

R. Stahl, a man­u­fac­tur­er and tech­nol­o­gist in Explo­sion Pro­tec­tion has been appoint­ed by the Inter­na­tion­al Elec­trotech­ni­cal Com­mis­sion (IEC) to organ­ise the IEC/TC 31 Con­fer­ence in Walden­burg from 25^th March 2019 to 5^th April 2019. This is the first time a man­u­fac­tur­er has entrust­ed with the respon­si­bil­i­ty to con­duct the IEC/TC 31 Conference.

There the tech­ni­cal com­mit­tee will draft the new inter­na­tion­al explo­sion pro­tec­tion stan­dards and update the exist­ing ones. Along­side the Atex direc­tives, which apply through­out the EU, these IEC stan­dards set out essen­tial require­ments for man­u­fac­tur­ers of elec­tri­cal and non-elec­tri­cal equip­ment that are designed for use in haz­ardous areas and for oper­a­tors of sys­tems installed in these areas. TC 31 mem­bers hail from 40 dif­fer­ent nations across the globe.

For many years now, the firm has devot­ed itself to par­tic­i­pate in numer­ous nation­al and inter­na­tion­al com­mit­tees and pan­els focused on achiev­ing the IEC’s objec­tive of estab­lish­ing explo­sion pro­tec­tion stan­dards glob­al­ly. The man­u­fac­tur­er draws on its excep­tion­al strength and prowess in the devel­op­ment and pro­duc­tion of inno­v­a­tive, explo­sion-pro­tect­ed prod­ucts. R. Stahl puts this exper­tise to good use to ensure that, from a tech­ni­cal per­spec­tive, new and exist­ing reg­u­la­tions and stan­dards can always be imple­ment­ed effec­tive­ly in prac­tice whilst striv­ing to ensure that test pro­ce­dures are rig­or­ous, safe, and as effi­cient as possible.

At the con­ven­tion, the com­pa­ny will con­tribute by appoint­ing eight of its senior most experts to var­i­ous work­ing groups tasked with the respon­si­bil­i­ty to amend the exist­ing explo­sion pro­tec­tion stan­dards for elec­tri­cal equip­ment and instal­la­tions. The Chair­man’s Advi­so­ry Group (CAG) will also be present at this con­fer­ence to over­see the progress. This group draws up all pro­pos­als regard­ing stan­dards and work­ing groups; these pro­pos­als are then vot­ed on in the TC 31’s ple­nary ses­sion.  Mem­ber­ship to the CAG is lim­it­ed to con­venors of the sub-com­mit­tees, main­te­nance teams and work­ing groups. CAG par­tic­i­pants from R. Stahl are Man­fred Kaiser, Brad Zim­mer­mann, Falk Thürmer and Otto Walch. The stan­dards drawn up by the TC 31 are used at IEC lev­el by the IECEx sys­tem for con­for­mi­ty assess­ment. Prof. Dr. Thorsten Arn­hold, in charge of Tech­nol­o­gy at R. Stahl, has been the IECEx sys­tem chair­man since 2014. In addi­tion, due to R. Stahl’s exten­sive exper­tise it belongs to a small num­ber of com­pa­nies that, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with TÜV Rhein­land, are autho­rised to pro­vide spe­cial­ist per­son­nel active in the field of explo­sion pro­tec­tion with train­ing in line with the IECEx com­pe­ten­cy cer­ti­fi­ca­tion scheme (CoPC).