NEES is an accredited design house.
We can either give core leadership in the design process, or alternatively, offer advice and guidance to help your organisation develop the right design options and ultimate solution. Our expertise runs from assessing the most efficient concept options for a design, through to the preliminary design, on to the detailed configuration stage. Considerable knowledge exists with our engineers in the design of critical systems, structures and components.
Important factors like function, control, performance, operability, reliability, availability and maintainability need to be accounted for in the design. Possible failure mechanisms and the margin of safety under hazard loading may also need careful investigation; for example, when gaining confidence in seismic withstand and assessing the extent of ductility.
We have considerable experience of situations when robustness of a safety justification may rely heavily on an in-depth design substantiation to give confidence in high integrity and reliability; for instance, in the case of harmful failure consequences. The design's withstand in the face of various abnormal conditions that include severe loading should also be captured, recognising what is inside the Design Basis, then being clear what resides outside the "normal" design envelope with a reduced margin of safety and a limited reliability.
The tolerance of the designed system to cope with faults is dependent on the actual configuration utilised; how vulnerable the hardware and software may be to deleterious initiating events, then the degree of redundancy, diversity and segregation of its functional parts. Independent and diverse protection systems may be required to safeguard against foreseeable fault scenarios that lead to unacceptable risk consequences.
We have practical experience in ensuring such design requirements can be achieved and adequately substantiated. In addition, our engineers and technologists can not only produce designs that meet the deterministic requirements, but also meet probabilistic safety levels in terms of tolerability of risk and safety objective targeting.
NEES has been accredited since September 1998 to Quality Management Systems (QMS) ISO 9001:2000; our accreditation number being GB 3629.
NEES is a Member of the Association for Consultancy and Engineering; membership number 00033797.
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