Hope you all are doing well. I am emailing because I have an issue on one of the studies I'm working on where the specifications from the contractor for the project state "The arc flash hazard analysis shall be performed according to the IEEE 1584 equations that are presented in NFPA70E-2009, Annex D. My issue is that all of my SKM versions do arc flash evaluations for 2015 and later and I was wondering if anyone has ever come upon this issue or if it even matters because I am using a later version of the code to do my arc flash evaluation.

Best Regards,
Engineer in Training

That is an odd specification in that IEEE 1584 is a stand alone standard that happens to be copied in Annex D of NFPA 70E so it should simply state "based on equations from IEEE 1584" period. When the new IEEE 1584 is issued, there will possibly be a short period of time when NFPA 70E Annex D and IEEE 1584 201X are out of synch and that spec could have lead to trouble.

An earlier edition of the IEEE 1584 equations in Annex D even had a typo with the units so using the exact equations from Annex D would have been a problem. However the good news is, I work with representatives of all the major arc flash software companies and know they are using the current IEEE 1584 std. They are all on the IEEE 1584 committee and are ahead of the curve when it comes to getting ready to implement the next edition.

If you have the ability, ask the owner of the spec to delete the part about the equations from Annex D and simply reference the actual source: IEEE 1584.

Welcome to the forum!

The latest edition of IEEE 1584 is 2002 with a few minor corrections that were issued over a decade ago. 70E sort of had a variation on the calculation that was dropped after 70E-2004.

Thank you everyone for the responses. I figured I was kind of thinking about this one a little too hard and that my clients specifications were a little out of date. Thanks again for the reassurance!

Best Regards,
Engineer in Training