Antaal Williams Engineering Consultants, Ltd. was officially formed in November 2018 in Calgary, AB Canada with representation in the USA in Knoxville, TN. The two principals that joined forces were Dr. Bikram S. Antaal, P.Eng. and Dr. Dennis K. Williams, P.E., ASME Fellow. The focus of the new organization was two-fold: first, to provide the legal and insurance professionals of North America with outstanding professional resources to assist in technical litigation matters; and second, to provide applied mechanics solutions to the more traditional industries including those in the power, refinery, petrochemical, and process industries with experienced professionals to solve piping, pressure vessel, supports and restraints, and mechanical engineering problems in the design and analysis of the same.
Antaal Williams ECL, while a relatively new player in the forensics market (in name only), has been morphed from the 30 years of operating Sharoden Engineering Consultants, P.A. (SEC) out of the Charlotte, NC USA area. SEC’s major focus was identical in all respects to those currently defined by Antaal Williams ECL. SEC’s clients included professionals representing deserving plaintiffs and those on the defense side of civil matters in the courtroom, including many well-known property and casualty insurance companies. In addition, over the past 30 years, SEC was engaged in a host of criminal cases where our expertise was sought in the origin and cause of fires, motor vehicle reconstruction, tool mark identification, and other forensic disciplines.
During the twenty or so years prior to the initial introduction of Dr. Antaal to Dr. Williams and SEC, some of the more noteworthy cases included the independent investigation of a major fire and explosion involving ethylene oxide in a petrochemical facility in the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia; numerous catastrophic and fatal accidents of workers involved with 100 ton rail cars filled with coal; arson investigations where multiple origins were determined to have eliminated any reasonable chance of an accidental fire; mechanical failures in rotating machinery and runaway chemical reactions in refinery and petrochemical facilities in Texas, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia; and literally multitudes of fire investigations surrounding “stolen and recovered burned” vehicles for high risk clients of various property and casualty companies.
During the most recent fifteen years, Dr. Antaal and Dr. Williams have combined efforts to design and analyze major piping and pressure vessel components for refineries, combined cycle power plants, upstream oil and gas innovators in the enhanced oil recovery (EOR) sector, and piping supports and restraints for the most modern large scale nuclear power plants built in North America, China, Western Europe, and the Middle East. Arising from these most recent efforts has been the granting of five patents for specialty steam generators for both small modular reactors (SMRs) that have been in the forefront of the energy news and the innovative EOR sector of the heavy oil business. With more than 100 peer reviewed publications and a multitude of lectures and presentations given around the world by our principal engineers, our future looks to expand on the continuation of providing competent and scientifically based information to our most demanding clientele.
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