A licensed forensic electrical engineer with a substation design background, for counsel and carriers who need to know why a transformer or substation failed and who is responsible.
Party names are what the check runs against. Nothing privileged is requested.
Ohm Forensics provides substation and transformer expert witness services in litigation, arbitration, and insurance claims. Transformer and substation losses tend to be expensive, technical, and contested: a failed power transformer can mean a long replacement lead time, business interruption, and competing theories about manufacturing defect, outside fault damage, overloading, maintenance, and protection.
The engineer on these matters spent his career designing and reviewing substations, so the analysis starts from how the equipment and its protection were supposed to work, then tests each theory against the records and the physical evidence.
Internal winding and insulation failures, component failures, and damage from faults elsewhere on the system, with defect, loading, and maintenance theories tested against the evidence.
Circuit breakers, switches, instrument transformers, surge arresters, and switchgear at distribution and transmission voltages.
Whether relays and breakers operated as designed, whether settings were appropriate, and whether a different scheme would have limited the damage.
Cause of the outage, restoration time, and the engineering facts behind interruption and loss of use claims.
Whether the grounding system kept shock hazards within safe limits, in injury and equipment damage matters.
Substation design defects, construction quality, startup testing, delay, and warranty claims between owners, contractors, and manufacturers.
Factory test reports, nameplate data, specifications, and manufacturer correspondence.
Oil and insulation test results, and maintenance and inspection records.
Protective relay event records, control system and alarm logs, and fault and loading history.
Inspection and, where the parties agree, teardown under a joint protocol, with outside laboratory testing when needed.
The work is led by a licensed Professional Engineer with an MBA and more than twenty years in power systems. That career was spent designing and reviewing the kinds of systems that end up in dispute: utility substations from 4 kV to 345 kV, utility-scale solar and battery storage plants, EV charging installations, and medium voltage distribution for large data centers, along with protection and coordination, fault current, and arc flash studies.
The engineering practice is still active. Opinions rest on current codes, current equipment, and current utility practice, which matters when opposing counsel asks when the expert last designed the thing being testified about.
That is often the central question. The answer comes from comparing the failure location and damage pattern with the factory test results, condition history, loading, and recorded faults. In many cases the evidence supports one explanation over the others; where it does not, the report says so.
Yes. We attend joint site inspections and teardowns under a protocol agreed by the parties, and identify what should be preserved before equipment is moved, repaired, or scrapped.
Yes. Protection and coordination is a core part of the engineer's design background, including review of relay settings, event records, and whether the protection operated as intended.
Distribution and transmission substations from 4 kV to 345 kV, and the medium voltage systems that serve large facilities such as data centers and industrial plants.
No engagement, no cost. If we are conflicted or this is not the right discipline for your question, we will say so.