HOUSTON — Power management company Eaton on Wednesday announced a collaboration with ATEC Training and Certification Services, a provider of competence training, inspection and management of equipment in hazardous area locations. Eaton’s Experience Center in Houston will expand industrial competency training modules to include CompEx global certification capabilities. The enhanced offerings will help design build engineers, plant operators, and industrial facility owners reduce cost and the potential for catastrophic events in hazardous and industrial environments.
The collaboration makes Eaton’s Experience Center in Houston the only NEC- and IEC-focused CompEx training location in North America, adding six new courses that take advantage of the facility’s true-to-life industrial environments and hands-on training opportunities. The Experience Center, which recently expanded to add six new interactive applications, including a full-scale downstream petrochemical plant, will also offer ATEC B.E.S.T. courses, which cover basic electrical and mechanical skills to provide a strong foundation of practices used in industrial workspaces.
CompEx, or competency in explosive atmospheres, is the global solution for validating core competency of employees and contract staff of major users in the oil and gas and industrial markets. It was designed and developed by industry for industry in 1994 to provide a validation scheme that ensures personnel have the knowledge and skills for the specialty within explosive atmospheres.
The CompEx Certification Body is accredited to ISO/IEC 17024 : 2012 Conformity Assessment – General Requirements for Bodies operating Certification of Persons. The CompEx Scheme provides independence for competency validation using only centers that are licensed to the CompEx Certification Body, having met their rigorous approval process. CompEx is a registered trademark of JTLimited, part of the JTL Group.
Eaton’s Experience Center in Houston features a 14,000-square foot simulated petrochemical refinery and power distribution grid with more than 8,000 products installed in applications from upstream to midstream to downstream. The interactive environment is divided into process and containment areas that allow visitors to experience a wide range of oil and gas training opportunities for hazardous and non-hazardous applications. The facility’s mock refinery gives visitors access to live demonstrations of difficult-to-reach oil and gas applications both offshore and land-based.
