What Is An Arc Flash Study?
A professional electrical engineer conducts an Arc Flash Study to understand better your electrical equipment, and the study best determines how to mitigate any potential AF hazard problems.
Far too often, plant electrical systems go through equipment changes without serious attention paid to short circuit levels and hazardous energy within the electrical equipment. Even new buildings and installations are not immune to short-circuit problems. The results can be expensive at best and disastrous at worst! Understanding how to conduct a proper study can reduce your company's risk and help avoid catastrophic AF injury to workers and equipment. Ultimately, it is all about AF electrical safety & equipment reliability.
Visit Our Arc Flash Study Training Page
Only after an arc flash study has been completed to determine the proper hazard level can engineering revisions be made to your electrical equipment to reduce the arc flash incident energy to manageable and safe levels. But only a proper study and short circuit study can identify the buses with high incident energy levels. Only an investigation can determine the rating of the personal protective equipment needed at each location in a facility.
Arc Flash Study Considerations
If you want to learn what is an arc flash study, you have to know it is a complicated engineering survey, so an electrical engineer usually performs it. However, preparing for an examination in advance can make the data collection process much easier and the results and a study more accurate. A study can indeed be time-consuming. Still, an accurately performed study can improve plant electrical safety by identifying the most dangerous hazards and whether plant safety can be improved.
A study usually involves four phases:
Of these four phases, only Step 2, the engineering study and report preparation, is done off-site.
A properly executed Arc Flash Study includes: