"Power-i", a significantly improved approach to explosion protection by intrinsic safety "i"

Abstract

But there is also one important disadvantage: The effective power that is available for intrinsically safe circuits is extremely limited (in particular for gas groups IIB and IIC) so that the advantages provided by the type of protection "Intrinsic Safety" do not apply to equipment with higher power requirements. According to the current state of the "Intrinsic Safety" standard IEC/EN 60079-11 [1], hardly more than 2 W can be achieved (for gas group IIC with the safety factor 1.5) with the solutions applied so far.