Flexible Consultancy Blending Relevant Skills

Our flexible consultancy services are a blend of process, safety and equipment skills that can provide safe, compliant and innovative solutions to your engineering problems.

Our depth of understanding allows us to provide more comprehensive answers to ATEX, DSEAR and CE marking problems. Not only do we understand the regulations, our process and equipment knowledge provide us with the skills to give you the best solution possible.

Combining these skills with our knowledge of solids handling and dust explosions allows us to dig deeply in the risks associated with powder handling processes and recommend cost effective solutions that minimise the safety risk.

Process Design and Consultancy

Integral Pharma Services are involved with all stages of process design from concept and business planning, through front end design and detailed design to acceptance testing and commissioning.

Good business planning does not only mean identifying products to sell and the likely size of market, but it is also necessary to understand the likely capital and operating costs. Our ability to rapidly understand and develop concept designs allows us to help our clients get to grips with these costs.

Frequently processes are moved from one production unit to another. This is a case where we are often part of the technology transfer exercise that needs to be carried out. Frequently, this involves detailed mixing studies and working with other consultancies on computation fluid dynamics.

Since we work mainly with batch processes much of our work involves batch sequencing connected to the mass and energy balance and the utility sizing calculations.

We also have considerable experience in design of batch process include fluid transfer calculations, batch mixing and the requirements for solids handling.

Safety Consultancy

Our approach is to integrate safety into all of our consultancy activities. We do not consider process safety to be a separate function.

We have significant expertise in dust explosion and use our own tool DExToRR to assess how to reduce the overall risks associated with dust explosions. This starts by looking at the elimination or inventory reduction of flammables and our process knowledge allows us to offer feasible solutions to reduce risk.

We frequently take a lead role in DSEAR Assessments, Hazardous Area Classification and ATEX Ignition Hazard Assessments. We consider risks from all flammable and other dangerous substances. Our frequent use of BS, EN, IEC and ISO standards mean that we have a detailed understanding of requirements for reducing risk.

We recognise that process equipment is also usually machinery as defined by relevant machinery regulations. We have developed our own tools to allow us to take a leading role in Safety of Machinery Risk Assessments. These need to be co-ordinated with HAZOPs, which are another area of our expertise.

Pressure relief is also an important safety related part of process design. A sound safety case can only be developed when full consideration is given to the generation of plausible relief scenarios. Since we are familiar with batch processes and complex reaction mixes, many of our relief cases relate to two-phase flow.

Equipment design and consultancy

The design, specification and procurement of equipment logically follows on from process design. Our expertise is not limited to process design but also includes many of the mechanical design aspects associated with equipment.

We work closely with other disciplines including architectural, building services, electrical, instrument and control, piping and procurement. Our many years of experience has made us fully familiar with the complete life cycle of equipment procurement from data sheet and specification development through bid analysis to acceptance testing (particularly for safety of machinery).

Safety Of Machinery is an area where we have considerable expertise. We are familiar with the relevant EU directives. Our consultancy services include reviewing EU Declarations of Conformities, conformity assessments, and Safety of Machinery Risk Assessments. Combining this with the complication of Technical Files allows us to assist our clients with incorporating and Safety OF Machinery partly completed machinery.

We also offer global assessments of equipment packages in relation to ATEX, EMC and PED. This allows us to assist our clients with Technical Files and EU Declarations of Conformity to cover these directives as well as the Machinery Directive.