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The standards for the determination of safety characteristics of powders have been defined more than 30 years ago. Today, they are well established and have proven their feasibility and practical applicability in industrial practice. However with the appearance of an increasing number of powders with high physiological activities (e.g. from pharmaceutical production) and with the development of nano-powders with yet unknown health hazards, the traditional testing methods have to be modified to meet the increasing requirements of industrial hygiene, because these testing methods often involve open handling of the test items. Within the EU project NANOSAFE the Swiss Safety Institute in Basel has developed a number of such new test procedures and has validated them against the existing standards. A series of modified test methods for the determination of safety characteristics of powders with health hazards have been developed. The methods are based on a reduction of open handling steps during sample preparation, testing and cleaning. It has been demonstrated that the data obtained by these methods are in good agreement with those obtained from conventional standard methods (Hartmann-Tube, Minimum Ignition Energy, Impact Sensitivity, Tests for Self-Heating or Self Ignition, Powder Bulk resistivity).