An interview with Brian Shiels, chair of the committee on personal protective clothing and equipment (F23) and vice chair of ASTM’s Board of Directors.

By Donovan Swift

Sep 02, 2025

Workplace safety is important across all industries, and ASTM’s committee on personal protective clothing and equipment (F23) helps keep employees safe, whether it be from fire and thermal hazards, ice hockey skates, or biological and chemical threats. I spoke with Brian Shiels, chair of the personal protective clothing and equipment committee and vice chair of ASTM’s Board of Directors, to learn more about the standards that help keep workers safe, as well as where the industry is headed. 

What is the focus of the committee on personal protective clothing and equipment? 

There are many reasons to use personal protective clothing and equipment for all different types of applications. My kids ride their bikes, and they wear helmets, and they once wore knee pads and elbow pads. That’s personal protective equipment (PPE). 

That’s all outside the purview of what we do in F23. The difference is in our scope. 

We are focused on standards around personal protective clothing and equipment that provide protection against occupational hazards. And that’s what really sets us apart. 

The committee’s focus hasn’t changed much since its inception, but we’ve added new types of hazards. We have our subcommittees broken up into types of hazards. So, we have physical hazards, chemical hazards, biological hazards, radiological hazards, and we’ve most recently added respiratory hazards. 

We’ve expanded our scope into different protections against different hazards, but in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we also have begun to push the limit on that strict interpretation of occupational hazards. We have standards for cloth face coverings that can apply to the general public, but we justified that as an occupational hazard because first responders and hospital workers encounter the general public every day carrying out their job. 

We’ve got some standards in our human factors subcommittee (F23.60) that can apply to general clothing comfort. That is important from an occupational standpoint, but it’s also important to everyone who wears clothes. So, the committee’s scope is really sort of evolving, but we’re still trying to be very deliberate around making connections to occupational hazards. 

What are some of the committee’s core standards? 

The most recent hot button one is the cloth face covering standard [standard specification for barrier face coverings (F3502)]. I mean that is a great example because of how the ASTM process came together in rapid response to a global pandemic. We published this one by following all the regulations and had it published in approximately nine months. 

The standard test method for thermal resistance, evaporative resistance, and total heat loss measurements of clothing materials using a sweating hot plate (F1868) is another important one. That’s one that we use for occupational clothing and PPE, but it can apply much more broadly. It’s a standard for evaluating the physiological impact of clothing. You typically have a balance of protection and comfort. So, all of these various standards that we have will provide protection. Whether it’s flame and thermal protection or it’s physical protection from chainsaws for example, it’s being balanced against comfort. We can protect against everything in the world, but we might harm you while you’re wearing it because your body just can’t release the body heat. So, this standard is really cool because it allows us to quantitatively evaluate clothing comfort and the physiological impact that clothing is going to have on your body. 

The standard test method for measuring cut resistance of materials used in protective clothing (F2992) has been in the news lately. For instance, a cut-resistant glove has a rating on it for how resistant that glove is to cut against a razor blade. It’s determined by that test method, but it has a unique application that really is an occupational hazard. We even do testing using that standard for the NHL. You may remember that there was an American-born professional hockey player in the U.K. who died not too long ago from injuries on the ice. He was cut in the neck by the skate of another player. USA Hockey and the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) responded, and cut-resistant neck protection is required at all levels of hockey in the U.S. now. The exception is the NHL because it has to first pass through the Players Association. 

Also, our flash-fire manikin standard (F1930) is a big one. It allows us to simulate a flash fire using a full-scale human form and predict second- and third-degree burn injuries in a laboratory. Obviously, we can’t use human subjects for that test. 

In the end though, they’re really all important. 

Hot work is cutting, grinding, welding, or putting together pieces of metal using heat.

What are some new and developing standards? 

We’ve had requests from the American Dental Association about jointly developing standards for PPE against X-ray radiation, and we do have a radiological hazard subcommittee, so that may happen soon. 

It’s not a new specification or a new standard test method, but the standard for protective clothing against steam and hot liquids had been under the purview of the Canadian General Standards Board (CGSB), and it was withdrawn or allowed to lapse intentionally. There are absolutely steam and hot-liquid hazards in workplaces today that persist. There are absolutely people wearing PPE designed to protect against steam and hot liquids, but there are no current standards, so that’s one that I know we will be creating. 

I think respiratory protection in general is an evolving area where we will be writing standards. And there may be a bit of a paradigm shift because there’s been a lot of change on the federal level recently. We’ve also been working for a long time on a standard for welding, or what we call “hot work,” which is cutting, grinding, welding, or putting together pieces of metal using heat. So that generates a lot of sparks and things like that. We don’t have any standards in the U.S. for that. 

We’ve worked with large industrial applications, and we’ve asked, “How do you determine that this leather cape is good for welding?” So, we’re trying to standardize that process. We can’t just lay a jacket on the floor and do some welding and see what the jacket looks like. That’s not a good quantitative evaluation. So, we’re working to develop both standard test methods and standard specifications around the realm of hot work. 

What do you think some major developments will be in the next decade, and what will standards do to address them? 

There’s a hot button issue out there right now, and I don’t think it’s going away. It’s about this forever chemistry called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). 

This applies across a lot of ASTM standards, but with regard to protective clothing, historically, there has been PFAS chemistries used in fabric productions, primarily in water and oil repellents. Since many industries are moving away from PFAS, it’s forcing the textile industry to come up with other ways to achieve water repellency and oil repellency. 

So, that’s where I see the development work happening – eliminating PFAS from those production processes in the textile industry that feeds into the protective clothing industry. But then also managing the unintended consequences from that. There are plenty of ways to achieve water repellency, but maybe without PFAS, the clothing may become no longer oleophobic, so now it doesn’t repel oils. And oftentimes oils are flammable. So, take the firefighter and fire service industry, where we used to be able to show that protective clothing could slough off water and hydraulic fuels, gasolines, diesel fuels, and things like that. They may now just spread across the surface of the fabric and those are flammable items. So, it may be necessary to come up with new ways to achieve that. So, we might not necessarily be developing new standards around that but using our existing standards and tweaking them to evaluate these products as the market evolves. Certainly, eliminating PFAS from the textile value chain is a big piece that will rely on many of our standards to evaluate those products. 

Can you describe your career path and how you became involved with ASTM? 

I’ve always been in protective clothing. That’s all I’ve ever done. So F23 is the right place for me to chair a committee. But I have an undergraduate degree in chemistry from the University of South Carolina. And then I started at North Carolina State in the College of Textiles, where I studied textile chemistry. And during my first semester at NC State, my research group was given a grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, following its inception after September 11, and our task was to add chemical and biological protection for firefighter protective clothing. Obviously, because many first responders died that day, but also many other first responders were getting sick and dying later from the various chemical and biological hazards that were at Ground Zero as it was being cleaned up. Different fuels, different building materials. Folks were getting sick and are still dying today, 25 years later. So, that’s what got me into the protective clothing world. 

After finishing my master’s at NC State, I stayed on staff at the university for about three years. I was continuing to work as a research assistant, and it was at that point that I started using ASTM test methods as part of my research. 

After finishing school, I went to a company called PBI Performance Products as a development engineer in 2008, and I became a member of F23 and the committee on textiles (D13), which of course plays a role in protective clothing. That’s when I really got involved more formally in the standards-development process. After a little over 10 years at PBI, I came to ArcWear, now a division of Kinectrics, which I currently manage. At ArcWear, we provide testing services for R&D and certification of all types of protective clothing. In addition to F23 standards, our offerings focus on PPE for electrical workers, leaning heavily on standards from the committee on electrical protective equipment for workers (F18). 

Within the first few years of joining ASTM, I became chair for the subcommittee on flame and thermal hazards (F23.80). Around that same time, I became vice chair of the committee and through that tenure, I served three years on the committee on standards (CoS), and then immediately after that I spent three years as chair of the CoS. 

In 2021, I joined the board of directors. Last year, I was chair of the finance and audit committee, and this year, I’m vice chair of the board. 

It’s always been protective clothing that has been my focus. The type of protective clothing has shifted a bit from time to time, but always some sort of protective clothing, and I suspect that’s all I’ll ever do. ●

Brian P. Shiels is service line manager for the ArcWear division of Kinectrics (Louisville, KY), which offers arc, flame, and thermal PPE testing and certification. Shiels, who joined ASTM International in 2008, is vice chair of ASTM’s Board of Directors and past chair of the committee on standards. He currently serves as chair of the personal protective clothing and equipment committee (F23) and is past chair of its subcommittee on flame and thermal hazards (F23.80). In addition, Shiels is a past vice chair of the committee on textiles (D13). He received a master’s degree in textile chemistry from North Carolina State University and a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of South Carolina. In addition to ASTM, he is a member of the National Fire Protection Association and the American Association of Textile Chemists and Colorists.

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