About Seagate Technology
Seagate Technology is one of the largest employers in Londonderry. As a U.S owned company, Seagate had global standards for electrical safety which includes a requirement for Arc Flash risk assessments at all manufacturing facilities.
Solution
Electrical Safety UK Ltd were contracted to undertake an Arc Flash study to IEEE 1584 and also carry out awareness training to staff and contractors.
Approach
ESUK discussed the scope and strategy with site management as well as with EHS managers in the U.S. It was decided to model the electrical systems into SKM Power Tools software and then to purchase the software for the site to make future alterations to the model.
ESUK subcontracted the discovery phase of the work to NECTA (now British Gas Electrical Compliance) who gathered information on some 1600 feeder cables. ESUK gathered data on the protection equipment “in house”. Once completed, meetings were held with Seagate HSE and Engineering Management at which strategies for risk elimination and reduction were agreed.
Following this, there were 120 low voltage panels which were identified in production areas that had high levels of incident energy. Working as a team Seagate and ESUK managed to successfully reduce the levels at all these panels to below 1.2 calories/cm2 at a distance of 450mm. Measures such as new protection settings, replacement of circuit breaker, installation of additional local switch fuses and re-feeding equipment were all adopted. Further training sessions were undertaken by ESUK to Facilities staff about awareness and risk avoidance/reduction.
