An arc flash study can be a very large commitment in time and resources

Is your facility’s arc flash study:

Completed
A work in progress
What is an arc flash study?

We are still looking for light at the end of the tunnel with this project. Much more involved that we imagined.

FAA Arcflash Study

The Federal Aviation Administration William J Hughes Technical Center is currently involved in a "basewide Arcflash study". Most of the effort at this time is focused on obtaining an accurate single line diagram to serve as a basis for the study. On a campus such as ours that is a daunting task.

Although the study could have been performed by our talented professional engineers, FAA management chose to have the study done by a consulting firm. This was done to free the engineers to do design and maintenance projects.

Our estimated time of completion is March of 2011.

FAA is committed to provide a safe work environment for its employees, contractors, tenants, 24x7, 365.


Eugene Hidalgo, PE
Senior Electrical Engineer

Likewise. We realized this is a much larger project than we imagined but we are almost there!

There is no one answer in my opinion:

1) as a consultant I am expected to 'complete' an arc flash study for my customers.

2) I write up a disclaimer indicating this arc flash study is valid for the conditions and codes as they existed at the time of completion; and it is emphasized that as these change the results are no longer assured.

As the methodology of arc flash calculations is revised, It seems that continuous process plants must repeat the calculations periodically.

MCC's: our next frontier

We have completed our study down to the substation/switchgear level. My contract engineer doing our study mentioned in passing a couple months ago that we need to start the MCC study. What!!! I fired back. Since then, I've studied and talked to more and more people who have convinced me that yes, an MCC is an even bigger risk than a switchgear, if for no other reason than it's switched much more often.

Consulting




This sort of describes me. I am a design-build consultant and provide a study for clients as part of the complete packaged service and use the same type of disclaimer. We have a lot of repeat business so are continually updating existing studies. The challenge is, as Gary alluded to, my clients are Processing Facilities and are continuously making changes/improvements but not having the study updated to reflect this, by me or whoever else is making the changes. So, I am often challenged to get the correct information as to what has been added/changed when updating a study from additions/changes I have just made.