Consultancy wins £70,000 research grant

A WARRINGTON-based consultancy that provides services to safety critical industries has been awarded an research and development grant worth almost £70,000.
The grant will see the Birchwood Park company make a significant contribution towards improving the safety and operations of civil nuclear power plants.
With the grant plus some internal funding,Corporate Risk Associates (CRA) will be conducting a comprehensive research project which will significantly enhance the industry’s understanding of potential system failures in nuclear power plants, aiding both plant safety and the uninterrupted supply of electricity.
Awarded by Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency which works with people, companies and partner organisations to find and drive  science and technology innovations that will grow the UK economy, the research will be completed throughout the course of this year.
CRA founder and chief executive  Jasbir Sidhu, said: “We are delighted to have been awarded this grant which will see CRA develop a process to generate realistic reliability estimates of SMART Control and Instrumentation (SC&I) to increase the safety within nuclear power plants.”
SC&I are intelligent control devices that employ programmable electronic components to collect and process data to enhance performance.
According to Mr Sidhu, the industry uses assessments of the reliability of engineered systems to understand safety margins. The reliability of SC&I technology is difficult to substantiate due to the inclusion of software, and this leads to an assumption that it performs much worse than indicated by operational experience.
“Current methods adopted in the industry involve using high confidence values based on Safety Integrity Levels (SILs), as stipulated in standards such as IEC 61508/IEC 61513.  We firmly believe this current method does not give a good indication of the ‘true’ reliability, as SIL figures are considered to be highly conservative.
“As such, we are extremely passionate about this project and developing a process that can ensure future decisions are based on realistic reliability estimates.
“It is great that we have received this grant from Innovate UK in recognition of the significant impact this project will have on the nuclear, process, transportation, and other high hazard industries where safety is, of course, of paramount importance.  Looking ahead this research will have a major impact on the understanding of risks from emerging and growing fields e.g. Data Centres.”
The project will be led by experts at CRA, including the company’s principal consultant Ashraf El-Shanawany and consultants Francesca Brandford-Adams and Garth Rowlands who will be researching the approach of Structured Expert Judgement (SEJ).
Established in 2000, CRA boasts a team of 40 technical consultants. The company prides itself on managing safety, reliability and risk across the nuclear, rail, defence and process industries, where delivering a robust risk analysis is part of the licensing processes..  The company has recently been awarded work with major organisations, including the Office of Nuclear Regulation, EDF Energy and Babcock International.