Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) suit – Can be worn in dangerous hazards, nuclear blast and in any life threatening occasions.

Personal protective equipment (PPE) is protective clothing, helmets, goggles, or other garments or equipment designed to protect the wearer's body from injury or infection. The hazards addressed by protective equipment include physical, electrical, heat, chemicals, biohazards, and airborne particulate matter. PPE suits can be similar in appearance to a cleanroom suit.

The purpose of personal protective equipment is to reduce employee exposure to hazards when engineering controls and administrative controls are not feasible or effective to reduce these risks to acceptable levels. PPE is needed when there are hazards present. PPE has the serious limitation that it does not eliminate the hazard at the source and may result in employees being exposed to the hazard if the equipment fails.

The use of personal protective equipment (PPE) is inherent in the theory of universal precaution, which requires specialized clothing or equipment for the protection of individuals from hazards. The term is defined by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which is responsible for PPE regulation, as the "equipment that protects employees from serious injury or illness resulting from contact with chemical, radiological, physical, electrical, mechanical, or other hazards". While there are common forms of PPEs such as gloves, eye shields, and respirators, the standard set in the OSHA definition indicates a wide coverage. This means that PPE involves a sizable range of equipment. There are several ways to classify them such as how gears could be physiological or environmental.

Notable Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) suit

Hazmat

A hazmat suit (hazardous materials suit) is a piece of personal protective equipment that consists of an impermeable whole-body garment worn as protection against hazardous materials. Such suits are often combined with self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) to ensure a supply of breathable air. Hazmat suits are used by firefighters, emergency medical technicians, paramedics, researchers, personnel responding to toxic spills, specialists cleaning up contaminated facilities, and workers in toxic environments.

The hazmat suit generally includes breathing air supplies to provide clean, uncontaminated air for the wearer. In laboratory use, clean air may be supplied through attached hoses. This air is usually pumped into the suit at positive pressure with respect to the surroundings as an additional protective measure against the introduction of dangerous agents into a potentially ruptured or leaking suit.

Working in a hazmat suit is very strenuous, as the suits tend to be less flexible than conventional work garments. With the exception of laboratory versions, hazmat suits can be hot and poorly ventilated (if at all). Therefore, use is usually limited to short durations of up to 2 hours, depending on the difficulty of the work. Level A (United States) suits, for example, are limited by their air supply to around 15–20 minutes of very strenuous work (such as a firefighting rescue in a building). However, OSHA/EPA protective level A suits/ensembles are not typically used in firefighting rescue, especially during a building/structure fire. National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) compliant "turnout gear", and NIOSH-certified SCBA, or CBRN SCBA, are the primary protection technologies for structure firefighting in the US.

Hazmat suits come in two variations: splash protection and gastight suits. The splash protection suits are designed to prevent the wearer from coming into contact with a liquid. These suits do not protect against gases or dust. Gastight suits additionally protect against gases and dust.

NBC

An NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) suit, also called a chemsuit or chem suit or chemical suit is a type of military personal protective equipment. NBC suits are designed to provide protection against direct contact with and contamination by radioactive, biological, or chemical substances, and provide protection from contamination with radioactive materials and all types of radiation. They are generally designed to be worn for extended periods to allow the wearer to fight (or generally function) while under threat of or under actual nuclear, biological, or chemical attack. The civilian equivalent is the hazmat suit. The term NBC has been replaced by CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear), with the addition of a new threat, radiological, meaning radiological weapon.

NBC stands for nuclear, biological, and chemical. It is a term used in the armed forces and in health and safety, mostly in the context of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) clean-up in overseas conflict or protection of emergency services during the response to a terrorist attack, though there are civilian and common-use applications (such as recovery and clean up efforts after industrial accidents).

In military operations, NBC suits are intended to be quickly donned over a soldier’s uniform and can continuously protect the user for up to several days. Most are made of impermeable material such as rubber, but some incorporate a filter, allowing air, sweat, and condensation to slowly pass through.

The older Soviet suit was impermeable rubber-coated canvas. Now known as the CBRN suit, the British Armed Forces suit is reinforced nylon with charcoal impregnated felt. It is more comfortable because of the breathability but has a shorter useful life, and must be replaced often. The British Armed Forces suit is known as a "Noddy suit" because some of them had a pointed hood like the hat worn by the fictional character Noddy. The Soviet-style suit will protect the wearer at higher concentrations than the British suit but is less comfortable due to the build-up of moisture within it. A Soviet suit was known as a "Womble" because of its long-faced respirator with round visor glasses.

EOD

A bomb suit, Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) suit, or a blast suit is a heavy suit of body armor designed to withstand the pressure generated by a bomb and any fragments the bomb may produce. It is usually worn by trained personnel attempting bomb disposal. In contrast to ballistic body armors, which usually focus on protecting the torso and head, a bomb suit must protect all parts of the body, since the dangers posed by a bomb's explosion affect the entire body.

Parts of the bomb suit overlap for maximum protection. The suit protects in several different ways. It deflects or stops projectiles that may come from an exploded device. It also stops or greatly decreases the pressure of the blast wave being transmitted to the person inside of the suit. Most bomb suits, such as the Advanced Bomb Suit, use layers of Kevlar, foam, and plastic to accomplish these functions.

In order to maximize protection, bomb suits come with a pair of interchangeable gloves and wrist guard attachments. This gives the wearer's hands mobility and protection needed for the task and avoids cross-contamination of any evidence found (e.g., fingerprints).

EOD technicians wear bomb suits during reconnaissance, 'render safe' or disruption procedures on potential or confirmed explosive threats. Such suits must provide a tremendous degree of protection from fragmentation, blast overpressure, and thermal and tertiary effects should the threat device detonate. At the same time, the suit can significantly hinder their mobility or situational awareness.

To effectively stop a blast wave, thick layers of Kevlar, foam, and plastic are needed to prevent serious bodily harm. Since the entire body needs protection, the resulting bomb suit is heavy (80 pounds (36 kg) or more), hot to the point of risking heat stress, and impairs movement. The materials needed to make bomb suits protective do not release body heat generated by the wearer. The result can be heat stress, which can lead to illness and disorientation, reducing the wearer’s ability to accomplish the task. The most recent models of bomb suits include battery-operated cooling systems to prevent heat stress. One manufacturer’s study claims that the internal cooling systems on 39 lbs and 81 lbs bomb suits helped the wearer stay at workable temperatures for up to an hour, even in a hot environment.

It is used in Hazardous and Dangerous control

In pharmacology, Hazardous drugs are drugs that are known to cause harm, which may or may not include genotoxicity (the ability to cause a change or mutation in genetic material). Genotoxicity might involve carcinogenicity, the ability to cause cancer in animal models, humans, or both; teratogenicity, which is the ability to cause defects in fetal development or fetal malformation; and lastly hazardous drugs are known to have the potential to cause fertility impairment, which is a major concern for most clinicians. These drugs can be classified as antineoplastics, cytotoxic agents, biologic agents, antiviral agents, and immunosuppressive agents. This is why safe handling of hazardous drugs is crucial.

Safe handling refers to the process in which health care workers adhere to practices set forth by national health and safety organizations that have been designed to eliminate or significantly reduce occupational exposure. Some of these practices include but are not limited to, donning personal protective equipment such as a disposable gown, gloves, masks, and the utilization of a closed-system drug transfer device. The key to safe handling is to protect the health care worker throughout the three phases of contact with hazardous drugs. These phases are drug preparation, administration, and disposal.

Dangerous goods, abbreviated DG, are substances that when transported are a risk to health, safety, property, or the environment. Certain dangerous goods that pose risks even when not being transported are known as hazardous materials (syllabically abbreviated as HAZMAT or hazmat).

Hazardous materials are often subject to chemical regulations. Hazmat teams are personnel specially trained to handle dangerous goods, which include materials that are radioactive, flammable, explosive, corrosive, oxidizing, asphyxiating, biohazardous, toxic, pathogenic, or allergenic. Also included are physical conditions such as compressed gases and liquids or hot materials, including all goods containing such materials or chemicals, or may have other characteristics that render them hazardous in specific circumstances.

Dangerous goods are often indicated by diamond-shaped signage on the item (see NFPA 704), its container, or the building where it is stored. The color of each diamond indicates its hazard, e.g., flammable is indicated with red because fire and heat are generally of red color, and explosive is indicated with orange because mixing red (flammable) with yellow (oxidizing agent) creates orange. A non-flammable and nontoxic gas is indicated with green.

An Arc flash is the light and heat produced as part of an arc fault, a type of electrical explosion or discharge that results from a connection through the air to the ground or another voltage phase in an electrical system.

Arc flash is distinctly different from the arc blast, which is the supersonic shockwave produced when the uncontrolled arc vaporizes the metal conductors. Both are part of the same arc fault and are often referred to as simply an arc flash, but from a safety standpoint, they are often treated separately. For example, personal protective equipment (PPE) can be used to effectively shield a worker from the radiation of an arc flash, but that same PPE may likely be ineffective against the flying objects, molten metal, and violent concussion that the arc blast can produce. (For example, category-4 arc-flash protection, similar to a bomb suit, is unlikely to protect a person from the concussion of a very large blast, although it may prevent the worker from being vaporized by the intense light of the flash.) For this reason, other safety precautions are usually taken in addition to wearing PPE, helping to prevent injury.

There are many methods of protecting personnel from arc flash hazards. This can include personnel wearing arc flash personal protective equipment (PPE) or modifying the design and configuration of electrical equipment. The best way to remove the hazards of an arc flash is to de-energize electrical equipment when interacting with it, however, de-energizing electrical equipment is in and of itself an arc flash hazard. In this case, one of the newest solutions is to allow the operator to stand far back from the electrical equipment by operating equipment remotely, this is called remote racking.