STANDARDISATION WORK OF THE IEC TC 31

STANDARDISATION WORK OF THE IEC TC 31

The IEC's standardisation work is organised across 150 Technical Committees (TC) and Subcommittees (SC) with various areas of focus. The topics are prepared within committees in Working Groups (WG), Adhoc Groups (AHG), Project Teams (PT) and Maintenance Teams (MT). The team is permanently tasked with creating, checking and revising international standards. These working groups are monitored and coordinated by the Plenary Group. This is responsible for implementing the work programmes of the relevant TCs and their SCs efficiently on time. The members of the TCs are countries which are represented by named persons.

One of these Technical Committees is the IEC TC 31 (TC 31), which deals with equipment for explosive atmospheres, operator tasks and area classifications, amongst other topics. The IEC TC 31 is tasked with establishing and updating the IEC standard series IEC 60079 (electrical explosion protection) and IEC 80079 (non-electrical explosion protection) so that these can be applied at the IEC level in the IECEx system for the conformity assessment. Alongside the ATEX directives, which are binding throughout the EU, the IEC standards set the most important principles for manufacturers of electrical and non-electrical equipment destined for use in hazardous areas and the essential requirements for operators of systems installed in these areas.

The aim of the TC 31 is to establish uniform standards applicable worldwide (uniform technical requirements) in the field of explosion protection in order to reduce the effort spent on certification and use the same products globally.

Within Europe, the effort spent on certification has already been significantly reduced through harmonisation by means of the binding ATEX directives. This is because in Europe every ATEX certificate must be recognised by a notified body. A manufacturer therefore only needs to have one certificate in order to bring to the market their explosion-protected equipment within the European Economic Area. Before this harmonisation was introduced, a manufacturer still had to produce a separate national certificate for each country.

In addition, parallel voting already exists in Europe which means that IEC standards are largely fully adopted into European standards. IEC standards are already fully adopted in national standards in some other countries too. Thus one IECEx certificate is currently sufficient for the international sale of explosion-protected equipment in the regions of Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Israel. No further national certificate is required. In Europe, only an additional ATEX label and the resulting ATEX certificate is required. In the USA and other regions, the IEC standards are applied with some deviations.

At present, 40 countries from all over the world are members of the TC 31, which is involved in the implementation and recognition of international standards.