4. Essential health and safety requirements

These highly detailed essential health and safety requirements, which must be met by the manufacturer, are set out in just over eight pages of Annex II to the directive.

The following summary of the main points is therefore highly reductive.

Provisions common to all protection devices and systems include :

• the principle of integrated explosion safety. Equipment must be designed for safe use in ATEX environments. To this end, the manufacturer takes steps to :

  • if possible, prevent equipment and protective systems from generating or releasing explosive atmospheres themselves,

  • prevent the ignition of explosive atmospheres, taking into account the nature of each ignition source (electrical or non-electrical),

  • ...