NFPA 2112 Standard 2012 Edition Now In Effect

The 2012 edition of NFPA 2112, Standard on Flame-Resistant Garments for Protection of Industrial Personnel against Flash Fire, 2012 Edition became effective August 31, 2011. These revisions mostly consisted of updates to specific standard requirements, and clarifications of existing wording. Specific changes are as follows:

Garment label wording now highlights the requirement for garments to provide upper and lower body protection in order to be fully compliant with the standard. Specifically, this emphasizes that NFPA 2112 compliant shirts or pants worn alone does not provide adequate protection. The standard now also acknowledges that garment ignition and resultant wearer injury from flammable clothing can result from any type of fire (jet flames, liquid pool fires, solid fires, etc) and not just from flash fires.

The 2012 edition also added a section relating to the topic of cold weather protective garments, which may result in more insulated garments becoming NFPA 2112 certified in the future. As part of this, it requires that garments with multiple separable layers (for example, a liner that can be removed from a certified jacket and worn as a stand-alone garment) must be tested and certified in all wearable configurations. It also establishes a separate thermal shrinkage requirement at a maximum of 20% for cold weather insulation material, which may result in more options to lower price or improve performance of existing outerwear lining.

The thermal protective performance test (TPP) was updated to specify the use of ASTM Standard Test Method 2700. The thermal insulation value will now be called HTP (heat transfer performance) instead of TPP. The TPP test method was revised to show that the result is only a measure of heat transfer and not a predictor of skin burn injury. The test apparatus and test results obtained from it are unchanged. Test reports for spaced and contact testing are still required.

Other updates included a  new requirement that zipper tape must be made from inherently FR fiber, clarification that the maximum allowable 50% predicted body burn requirement on testing is based on the total surface area of the mannequin covered by sensors and excludes the hands and feet (which are not instrumented), revisions to the laundering procedures used to test flame resistant fabric durability to include additional rinse cycles, and a slight increase in the weight of the 100% cotton undergarments worn by the instrumented mannequin during flash fire testing.

These changes do not significantly impact our ability to provide high quality compliant flame resistant garments to our customers at affordable prices. 

This entry was posted on December 22, 2011 at 14:20 and is filed under Industrial, Flame-Resistant, American Work Safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.