has his own Arc Flash horror story. Prior to joining Siemens he worked in a plant where a worker got seriously hurt checking the voltage on a circuit to make sure it had enough power to drive another piece of equipment. “He had second and third
degree burns from the waist up. He was in the hospital for nearly a year and
needed multiple skin grafts.”

This incident led to the creation of an Arc Flash task force for the company’s five North American plants. “We started with making sure we had the right PPE, but then we went
looking for ways to eliminate Arc Flashes altogether.”

Eventually Richards realized that reducing the need to open the cabinet in the first place was one of the best ways to accomplish that goal. "People open the cabinet for many reasons, but chief amongst them is that, typically, they don’t know what’s
going on inside," he says. "They know there’s a problem; they are getting an
alarm or a circuit has tripped or something. But they don’t know exactly what.
What if we can get that information without opening the cabinet?"

By integrating all the relevant equipment, such as the motors, drives and switchgear, with the communications network in what Siemens calls a Totally Integrated Automation
(TIA) architecture, operators are able to monitor and pull diagnostic information, perform trend and root cause analysis and generally better see what the problems are before sending an electrician into the plant to deal with a problem. Over time Richards found that workers were going into the electrical cabinet less and less often.

“As we used it more, the guys learned to trust the information they were getting,” Richards said. “If a breaker tripped, they knew it. But, before the TIA system, there was nothing to do but reset the breaker. The TIA diagnostics allowed engineers to go back and
trend the data—to perform and process the diagnostics externally. For example, if I wanted to know what the drive current was, I could just look that up. As a result, we found that, over time, people were going into the cabinet less and less.”

Phillips agrees that the TIA approach is solid. “If there are ways to monitor and control things that keep people from opening the cabinet then that’s a much better way. The best option is always to avoid the hazard. Doing this through automation and control
is a great approach.”

“Having access to this data does not stop arc flash,” cautions Richards. “The number
one thing you can do to avoid that is to coordinate your power system and reduce your exposure to a potential incident. And the more you integrate, the less likely you are to have to open the cabinet in the first place.”

Arc Flash Resources:

www.SafetyBase.com

Many free articles and downloads - www.brainfiller.com

A global community about arc flash and electrical safety - www.ArcFlashForum.com

Siemens Arc Flash brochure

Siemens Arc Flash studies

Video of Arc Flash accident