Ensuring Safety in Electrical Engineering Design

Electrical engineering design needs to be safe from all sorts of potential accidents and disasters. The problem in ensuring electrical safety is that only following the code would not be adequate, whether you're dealing with products or systems. Even if you follow statuary standards and regulations, you still need to engage in a deeper analysis. Only such a move would guarantee you a safe path in a legal forum.

Expecting that human behavior might help ensure electrical safety could also get you into a court case. In fact, it's an open invitation to disaster if you think that even a harmless product can't cause injury. Hence, it's imperative that you employ a design process that not only follows legal standards, but is also well defined. Identifying, understanding, and complying with these aspects of the design process are vital. Even though engineers can't be expected to think like lawyers, they need a thorough understanding of the laws and how the law views engineering design and its process. Engineers need to regard any system or product that brings electrical energy into close contact with human beings as risky, because electrical injury in such situations may be inevitable.

When the design process commences, strong consideration must be given to foreseeable risks that may arise as a result of using the system or product. This is true regardless of whether the use is intended or unintended. This point must be kept in mind while constructing any design. Legal standards make it mandatory that before the system or product is launched into the market, all anticipated modes of failure need to be identified and dealt with. It therefore becomes important for the electrical engineer to consider the design process in the background of the existing legal environment. Such a move will help ensure that the risk of electrical injury, and hence any litigation, is reduced. Design for electrical safety must be learned in much the same way it would be viewed in legal forums. This helps not only maximize the safety of the environment, but also minimize the exposure to liability.

Engineering design process has been defined in different ways by different engineering texts. It usually contains a methodology that's composed of identification, problem definition, search, constraints, criteria, alternative solutions, analysis, decision, specification, and communication.

Simply stated, engineering design is an iterative process in which the final product is produced through design, analysis, and redesign. All these processes are duly complied with before reaching the final design.

Negligence results when an engineer has failed to comply in ways in which a responsible engineer would in a similar situation. Avoiding negligence means that an engineer needs to avoid failing in the duties that have been assigned to him.

Steward Hudson is a researcher/blogger with experience writing for multiple industries including health, energy, finance, and more. He currently writes for Electrical Engineering Company NY Current Solutions PC .

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