Equipment manufacturers face a version of process safety that’s less about their own facility and more about what happens after the equipment leaves the building. A company building dust collectors, mills, dryers, conveyors, or explosion protection systems needs to understand the hazard the equipment is meant to control well enough to design it correctly, size it correctly, and stand behind it when a customer or an AHJ asks how a rating or a design basis was determined. Getting that wrong doesn’t just create risk in one facility, it propagates into every installation that uses the equipment.
That responsibility runs in two directions. Manufacturers building equipment for use in hazardous locations need ignition source analysis and hazardous area classification support to properly rate their own products for the atmospheres they’ll operate in, whether that’s IEC Zone classification for an international customer or NEC Class and Division for a domestic one. And manufacturers building protective equipment, explosion vents, suppression systems, isolation valves, need combustible dust testing data that reflects real material behavior, not just a generic design basis, since undersizing a vent or suppression system because of bad Kst data is a problem that shows up at the worst possible time.
HazBasis supports equipment manufacturers with combustible dust and explosibility testing to inform protection equipment design, ignition source analysis for equipment rated for hazardous locations, hazardous area classification under both IEC and NEC frameworks, and electrostatic hazard testing for components and materials used in classified environments. We also work with manufacturers on incident investigation when a piece of equipment is implicated in a failure, since understanding what actually happened in the field is often the fastest way to improve the next design.