In meeting certain NEMA requirements, the design engineer should contemplate about an enclosures’ capability to withstand harmful environmental hazards. In this article, we will discuss how can each NEMA rating can effectively protect your equipment from environmental hazards.

Sheet metal enclosures

The metal sheet electrical boxes is equipped to effectively protect your equipment from solid and water ingress that can come from floating dust, debris or hose-directed/splashing water. Primarily, metal sheet electrical enclosures are designed to be able to meet NEMA requirements for its several ratings. However, if you need the electrical enclosure to be partially or totally submersed in water (like in marine offshore applications) then this material is not the best choice for you. Below are some guidelines that you can follow:

NEMA Type 1 Electrical Boxes: It is recommended to only use two simple piece enclosure style that is covered on top of the case. In this scenario, a L, U, or extruded electrical enclosure would suffice.

NEMA Type 2 Electrical Box: We best recommend to have overlapping flanges on the open seams of the case. To fasten the seams of the enclosure, you should use tack, sport, or plug welds. This can totally depend on the severity of the environment that you are in. For any engineering application, you might require a fully welded seams. The U-shape enclosure will work at its best when it has fewer welded seams.

NEMA Type 4, 4X: At best, it is recommended to have fully welded seams when you are using gaskets for your enclosure. Gaskets is a perfect use for anything that has to do with water being near or even for water being hose directed to the case. In some of the applications of enclosure gasket, the utilization of style foam strips or full gasket piece will be enough. You should do fastener sealing as soon as you notice that there will be water in the enclosure application. Therefore, you should seal the edges with fasteners.

One of the most strategic placement of fasteners to seal the edges is that they should not be too obvious inside the case. In addition to this, you can also do the following: assembling the edges with sealing screws and utilization of latch or lack to fasten enclosure.

If you want to achieve the type 4X for electronics enclosure, you should opt for a corrosion resistant sheet metal such as stainless steel, almuminum or galvanneal in order to fully achieve this rating.

NEMA Type 5 Electronics Enclosure: The use of overlapping flanges should be utilized on open seams of the electrical box or even fully welded seams. Totally depends on the type of environment you will use the enclosure in. For this type, U-shape enclosure would work the best.

If you are looking for any enclosure that can be partially or totally submerged in water, you can do the above recommendations. The recommendations on sealing can effectively meet NEMA Types 1, 2, 4(X) and 5 respectively. In line with this, these enclosures can be completely sealed as long as the right 0-rings or gaskets are made waterproof. This should be sufficient enough to protect your equipment form prolonged submersion in water by meeting the NEMA Type 6(P) standard.

Keep the following in mind when designing this type of enclosure for water immersion:

The enclosure should be designed in a way to minimize the number of seams to seal, with fewer parts and seams; there is less chance of water entering the enclosure.

There is one tip any design engineer should keep in mind when you are designing an enclosure for submersion application: the electrical box should be designed in a structure that the seams to seal will be minimized – requiring fewer parts and seams. With this in mind, there is a lesser chance of water entering the enclosure.

Stainless steel is one of the world’s most popular steel because it is commonly used in several industries such as construction, industrial, and engineering companies. Stainless steel has a very good durability and versatility of a steel material that makes it very useful in just almost everything. It can be used in private homes to commercial businesses to manufacturing processes. In almost everywhere, you can see stainless steel being utilized in their processes.

Because of these very amazing properties, aside from being it a very popular material around the world, it is also one of the most commonly used materials for making an electronics enclosure. Stainless steel can bring many great benefit to an electrical box, such as follows:

Stainless steel electronics enclosure has the capability to effectively resist sever and harmful, extreme weather conditions.

Stainless steel can be a very good material for security and limiting unauthorized access.

Stainless steel has high resistance to corrosion and makes a wonderful enclosure that can be used for marine offshore applications and food manufacturing plants.

It can give protection against solid ingress that can occur from airborne dust and debri.s

As a user, you might also be wondering what gives these types of materials these amazing characteristics. Also, what makes it different from other common types of steel such as carbon steel? In this article we will also dive into what creates a steel into a usable form and what is the most important make-up or composition for a steel.

What is a Steel Made Off?

Let us start with a very basic question: what steel is made from that gives it all its amazing properties?

First, we begin with the iron composition. Iron is now a very useful and most common element in steel composition. However, just using it alone, it is too soft to be very suitable for construction, tools, and other types of applications where you can use steel for. However, by mixing iron into any steel alloy that contains carbon, it becomes much stronger and very durable.

With this in mind, the purified and enhanced steel version is called steel. In creating stainless steel there are other elements being added such as chromium, manganese and nickel. In creating stainless steel, it is also necessary to remove the impure ones such as nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus.

In addition to this, you get stele that can be used for these several types of application through the step of steel-making. A very complex method where steels are being processed and manufactured into its desirable, usable form. By also combining different elements, steels are being created in durable and flexible form.