Ryan Brownlee has been with
Pepperl+Fuchs for more than 21 years and has held various roles within the company including engineering and product design, production testing, product certification, solution engineering, and management roles. He currently serves as the Product Manager-MCC Americas/Hazardous Locations SME at Pepperl+Fuchs. As part of this role, his responsibilities include keeping up to date on various standards and trends in the process automation industry and supporting the organization internally on various product safety standards, particularly hazardous areas standards.
Since 2014, he has served on both national and international standards committees for hazardous area safety standards. Nationally, he is a member of UL Standards Technical Panel (STP) 60079 and STP 913, which cover most UL standards for hazardous area products, including the national adoption of the IEC 60079 series of standards for hazardous areas in the United States. Within these groups, he chairs two task groups, one for pressurization, UL60079-2, and a new standard targeting mobile equipment in hazardous areas, UL120003.
He is also a member of the NFPA committee EEC-AAA responsible for NFPA 496 (pressurization) and NFPA 497 and 499, which address material and area classification for gases/vapors and liquids (497), and dusts (499).
Internationally, he is a member of IEC technical committee TC31G, which deals specifically with intrinsic safety, where he is a US expert supporting 60079-11 and 60079-47. He is also part of TC31, which addresses many other IEC 60079 series of standards, and is a US expert for 60079-7 (increased safety), 60079-42 (functional safety), and 60079-2 (pressurization), which he co-chairs as well as a new formed group looking at robotics and drones in hazardous locations. He also part of ICHL, which is responsible for a number of hazardous area standards in Canada, including the Canadian adoption of the IEC 60079 series of standards.
He has been published in IAEI magazine and has contributed to articles in Process Engineering and Control Design magazines on various topics related to hazardous areas. He has presented at PCIC on mobile device safety in hazardous areas and has been featured in podcasts on Chemical Processing magazine’s website on hazardous area risks and safety. He regularly provides training on a variety of topics related to hazardous area safety and product certifications.
