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Safety Insulation

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anvo

Electrical
Sep 27, 2005
1
I have a general definition problem concerning safety insulation. Perhaps, someone can help me out.

1) In several IEC standards (e.g. IEC 664-1) insulations are defined like functional, basic, supplementary, double, and reinforced insulation. In every-day-communication I realized that people are setting reinforced insulation equal with safety insulation. Is this right?
2) Assuming that above statement is right and someone has established a design according to safety insulation by help of addional solid insulation. Now it could happen that during a fault condition, which leads to a destruction of the solid insulation (due to intensive power dissipation) the reinforced insulation is no longer in place and conductors from one voltage domain get in contact with conductors of a second voltage domain (independent if this happens for some microseconds or permanent). Is it correct still to call this safety insulation? Or has someone explicitly to mention it is safety insulation, but certain failure scenarios have to be avoided by external, user depended measures (e.g. fuses, grounding, etc.)?
 
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